Karen Wimhurst has been a long term committed community artist and educator. Working with babies and mothers through to the elderly, her work has been the subject of the Lillian Baylis Lecture, ENO, Radio 3 and 4 features and documentaries. She has run programmes for English National Opera, Welsh National Opera, Scottish Chamber Orchestra and was resident composer on the Confluence Project with Common Ground 1999-2001. She specialises in teaching composition across the board, opening up creative resources which people may never have imagined!
Collaborative compositions with the elderly have been featured at the Wigmore Hall, the War Museum, the Wellcome Trust. In recent years she has written widely for children and young people with works commissioned by WNO, SoundStorm, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Manchester Camerata, the Pound Arts Centre and Common Ground.
Primary Education and Music
Karen leads creative workshops in primary school such as the Ukulele Composition project where each child composed their own piece which was eventually released on a CD.
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Working with AUB - Arts University Bournemouth and
Modip - The Museum of Design in Plastics
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In 2018 Karen was artist in residence at MoDiP and created a workshop series culminating in w-Rap a project which took her into local schools to run workshops for Year 9 - 13 children. The work explored the use and implications of single use plastics and focused on reusing discarded plastic in a musical context, to create instruments and sound and compose new music. The children created a show called w-Rap which was performed at AUB.
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Pippin Project
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This series of workshops were commissioned by Pound Arts in 2014, for artist Scot Farlow working alongside Karen Wimhurst and film artist Penny Ellis. Working across primary Schools in Wiltshire and South Gloucestershire, the team planted new orchards with primary school children in their school grounds creating artwork, original sound, poems, and bespoke wasailing songs and ceremonies to celebrate these orchards.
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