Hexham’s Queen’s Hall will be boosted when welcoming back visitors later this year with the addition of new LED lighting. The new strips - located on the outside of the building on Beaumont Street - have replaced the older, less energy efficient lights that were previously installed. “These new lights should be a lot easier for us to manage,” said Queen Hall’s Artistic Director Katy Taylor. “They’ve been installed using funding we’ve received from Arts Council Funding as part of the Covid recovery fund and we thought it was a great idea to modernise our lights outside of the building.
The Daily Heller: Beastly Fun for a Beastly Time
Earlier in 2020, when Covid spread in the U.K., design entrepreneur
Aidan Saunders tried making things for people to craft for free using their home printers while they were hunkered down. Through the
Folk Beasts Risograph activity packs to send to
neurodiverse people who had nowhere to go and nothing to do in lockdown. The packs offer creative prompts and guidelines for making handmade paper toys and games, and include a free two-color A3 Risograph print.
The project has grown to earn Arts Council Funding ( as you probably know, getting any funding is a miracle ) and the initiative is now distributing packs to organizations around the country. An online exhibition showing all of the material created from the artist packs is also in the works. Here, Saunders offers some more insight into the endeavor.