Shallal Sketchbooks is an ongoing community art project involving hundreds of people in the UK and overseas over the past five years. Participants are sent a sketchbook in the post and after three months they return the full sketchbook to Shallal to be included in a growing travelling library.

We are grateful to our social prescribing partners Imagine If CIC for helping Sketchbooks to carry on through the current pandemic.

Picture Post was a Shallal Studios project to stay connected with our artists during the pandemic in 2020, and to allow our creative community to thrive.

We sent artists an activity pack each week with ideas for making art, along with instructional videos. We worked in partnership with Project Ability in Glasgow, who shared their art videos with us too. The weekly activity packs were available online so that artists anywhere could take part.

Portraits was a Shallal 2 performance at the Royal Cornwall Museum as part of their Fun Palace in October 2019 to mark the opening of the museum's ‘Face to Face’ portraits exhibition.

Faces was a performance by Shallal 2 community performance dance group at Falmouth Art Gallery in March 2017. The ideas for the original performance were based on the exhibition 'Faces of Cornwall':

In October 2017 Shallal 2 was invited back to Wheal Martyn to perform again after the success of their Beautiful Dirt show in April

The new show Clay, again drew inspiration from clay mining heritage at Wheal Martyn museum. Shallal 2 was joined by dancers from Shallal's Out There dance group in Liskeard as well as young people from Mevagissey School Dance Club, Doubletrees School and St Austell Home Ed Group.

Afterwards Wheal Martyn education officer Gemma Martin said:

Beautiful Dirt was an original performance by Shallal 2 community performance dance company at Wheal Martyn china clay mining museum

Shallal 2 researched the history behind Wheal Martyn as inspiration for their dance pieces. Shallal 2 was joined by dancers from Shallal's Out There dance group in Liskeard.

Wheal Martyn was extremely pleased with the performance. Education officer Gemma Martin said this:

Picture It was a show by Shallal 2 community dance company at Falmouth Art Gallery on 12th December 2018. The performance was inspired by pictures exhibited in the gallery.

Many thanks to Falmouth Art Gallery for their continued and valuable support.

Our 2019 Back Lane West cross-art residency ended with a sharing event on 31st October

The walls were filled with art made during the month-long residency including collaborative sculpture, drawings, painting, photography, films, electronic music and poetry. The exhibition included shadow puppets made by children at Red River School in Redruth as part of the project. This was our first Back Lane West residency to include artists from our new Shallal Studio at Krowji creative hub in Redruth. 

Krowji Christmas Open Studios was our first opportunity to open our doors to the public and show people what Shallal Studios is about

Local people from Redruth and local artists came to see Shallal's new studio G08 in the Percy Williams building at Krowji. As well as showing paintings, drawings, photography and mixed media work, our Shallal Sketchbooks archive was on display and people enjoyed browsing through the books.