The Craft Department
The Craft Department offers training and support to all St Dunstaners at Charity Centres as well as in their own homes. The flagship of the department is the well equipped craft workshop at Ovingdean, which is often the highlight of a visit to our main centre for many St Dunstaners.
Accessible to everyone
The craft workshop is open to St Dunstaners, and includes adjustable workbenches to accommodate wheelchairs, as well as standard ones. There are special facilities for two of our popular activities, pottery and wood-turning.
Crafts available
The wide variety of crafts on offer includes:
- Chair-caning
- Weaving
- Mosaics
- Painting and drawing
- Picture-framing
- Rug-making
- Papier mâché
- Stone carving
- Pottery and ceramics
- Wood-turning
Woodwork
The dedicated woodturning workshop has all the equipment necessary to produce beautiful one-off pieces, including a lathe, bandsaw, pillar drill, chop saw, linisher and grinder. As well as woodturning, St Dunstaners study wood carving, routing and joinery.
Pottery and ceramics
The pottery room is comprehensively kitted out with two electric wheels, drying and glazing facilities and a kiln.
Specialist courses
Advancing skills is just as important to us as teaching new ones, so we run specialist courses in all the crafts we teach, for beginners and for those with some experience.
St Dunstaners are justifiably proud of the work they produce in the Craft Workshop. A selection of unique items is always available at Ovingdean for visitors to buy.
Exhibitions and conferences
The craft department also plays a key role in raising awareness of art and visual impairment in the wider community. From winning the Big Draw competition in 2005, to exhibiting at Blind Art in Bankside Gallery, London, and producing the international In Touch With Art Conference at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in 2007, the department has worked hard to promote access to art activities for all visually impaired people.