{"id":343,"date":"2025-09-19T12:12:32","date_gmt":"2025-09-19T11:12:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digitalspace.bradfordcollege.ac.uk\/14990109\/?p=343"},"modified":"2025-09-29T15:00:52","modified_gmt":"2025-09-29T14:00:52","slug":"south-square-centre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digitalspace.bradfordcollege.ac.uk\/14990109\/2025\/09\/19\/south-square-centre\/","title":{"rendered":"South Square Centre"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Grassroot Origins<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

As part of my time at Bradford 2025, I get the opportunity to work with a local arts organisation. I was fortunate enough to work with South Square Centre, spending a one day per week helping with different tasks while there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

South Square Centre opened as a gallery in 1982, but was originally a set of workers cottages arranged in a courtyard formation. Post industrialisation, the site was left in dereliction, until a group of 30 people and graduate students from Bradford College restored the building to accommodate gallery spaces and community gatherings. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, South Square Centre hosts many community events and workshops alongside their galleries and exhibitions. One event that I was granted agency over was during Thornton Art Trail, where the whole Village was invited to engage with art and sculpture. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As part of South Square’s programme, I ran a metal embossing workshop to engage participants with upcycling materials through crafts.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Metal Embossing Workshop<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

The inception of the workshop involved reviewing my own skill sets as well as evaluating what is most feasible for the average participant to do. For example; is it safe enough? How suitable is it for guests? Is it something people will want to try again? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To ensure the workshop was safe enough, participants were provided with a sheet of pre-cut aluminium metal where they can emboss patterns onto. to make sure everyone is able to participate, additional provisions needed to be sourced, such as sculpting\/ embossing tools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the original initiative was to promote upcycling in a creative way, I needed to include a way to teach people how to do so. Thus, one of the outputs that I prepared for the workshop was an instructional leaflet, containing details of how to deconstruct a metal drinks can, some embossing techniques and a few templates which goes with the outdoors themes of Gardens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Through the facilitation of this workshop, I have gained a lot of valuable experience on how to run an arts and crafts. Some skills include leadership, safeguarding, instructing and creative teaching. On top of these, I was also able to work on my graphical presentation skills through drafting a printable leaflet that people were able to take with them, that looks professional and creatively influenced. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These are all things that I would be doing within my design business, although if I were to do this again, I would implement the method of craft into its subject matter, which would aim to connect people with the craft in a holistically engaging way. For example, could the designs being embossed relate some way to the material? It could link to a number of things such as the origins of the craft, the act of upcycling, even how we are manipulating the material.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Website Building<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

An important asset to any contemporary business is their website, as having a presence online is important in reaching audiences. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part of my work as South Square involved adding new pages to their website, such as an archive section for old exhibitions to be accessible and a series of pages detailing case studies on South Square’s own outreach projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This experience with building their webpage has developed my own website making skills, on top of general presentation and ordering of information to make things accessible to all users.<\/p>\n<\/div>

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The software provided was able to break down images by colour and automatically outline the objects without needing a vector layer. This has been a fun and interesting experience using CNC machines in a practical context which I would have only used for school assignments before. I’ve gained vital insight into how I could apply CNC machine usage for my business as a designer for architectural and structural projects. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following this, I would like to experiment with paper and card to test what 3D structures can be made, which would aid in spatial design.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Cricut Maker 4 – CNC Machines<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

South Square Centre houses many studio grade equipment, such as fabric printing studios and a RISO printer. A recent addition to their equipment is a Cricut Maker 4, which I have been leading on setting up. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I have used a laser CNC machine before, I was equipped with standard industry knowledge on how to operate it. While the Cricut 4 does not use laser technology, it is essentially a single blade die cutter, with the user needing to provide the cutting data electronically instead of using a premade physical die. In a lot of ways, I found it similar to using a laser cutter but without the laser.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This came with its own parameters to get used to though. while a laser would move across the material, the blade on this machine only moved in one direction, with the blade spinning to change the direction of cut. How 2 dimensional cuts are made is by the cutting bed moving itself. With both moving in tandem, they are able to cut out intricate shapes designed beforehand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Our Story \u2013 South Square Centre<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Grassroot Origins As part of my time at Bradford 2025, I get the opportunity to work with a local arts organisation. I was fortunate enough to work with South Square Centre, spending a one day per week helping with different tasks while there. South Square Centre opened as a gallery in 1982, but was originally […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":973,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-unit-3-creative-portfolio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalspace.bradfordcollege.ac.uk\/14990109\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalspace.bradfordcollege.ac.uk\/14990109\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalspace.bradfordcollege.ac.uk\/14990109\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalspace.bradfordcollege.ac.uk\/14990109\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/973"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalspace.bradfordcollege.ac.uk\/14990109\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=343"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/digitalspace.bradfordcollege.ac.uk\/14990109\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":695,"href":"https:\/\/digitalspace.bradfordcollege.ac.uk\/14990109\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions\/695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalspace.bradfordcollege.ac.uk\/14990109\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalspace.bradfordcollege.ac.uk\/14990109\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalspace.bradfordcollege.ac.uk\/14990109\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}