More than 100 artists and designer-makers are preparing for 72 Christmas fairs, pop-up exhibitions and studio events throughout November and December as Oxfordshire Artweeks presents its ‘runaway’ Christmas Season at interesting venues across the county. They’re the perfect places to choose unusual gifts, often inspired by Oxford and the local environment, and make your Christmas shopping interesting this year.
Jewellers, ceramicists, textile artists, painters and photographers, metal sculptors, wood turners, stone carvers, print-makers and leather-workers will be presenting seasonally-inspired art and crafts to the public for free, and they’re the perfect places to pick up original quality handmade gifts for under the Christmas tree.
Among the unique offerings on show, you’ll a snow peacock in vintage textiles in Didcot (in the Freeborn Gallery from 6th November until 15th December); birds on driftwood that floated onto the beach in Little Wittenham (Sylva Wood Centre; 18th and 19th November), birds for the garden that won’t fly away at Steventon Green Pottery (17th-19th November), and mosaic birds glittering in the canal-side Holy Cross church in Shipton-on-Cherwell (1st-3rd December).
The city of Oxford depicted by the paintbrush of local artist Deborah Williams will be on sale in a new ‘West Oxford’ calendar at the Handmade Christmas Market in the West Oxford Community Centre (25th & 26th November) alongside handmade notebooks and lighthearted papier-mache sculpture reminiscent of the type of childhood described in Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales, a classic picture book which inspired the snowy wall art on show in Deddington’s Wychwood Gallery during the Artweeks Christmas season.
Bursting with bright Christmas candy colours, glass artists Jackie Birchill, Phillippa Stacey of Feathered Glass, and Pam Armitage open their studios in Holton, Marcham and Oxford to and welcome visitors in December, whilst for those who prefer sleek contemporary designs, those with a literary bent will find intriguing metalwork in Stonesfield, while rowers and river-lovers can head to East Oxford where the clean fresh prints by ex-Olympian Annabel Eyres will make a winning present.
