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The Cranfold Artists’ Collective was set up by Sharon Duggan in October 2006. Since this time, its membership has grown steadily.

We broadly cover the “Cranfold” area, that is, approximately a ten - fifteen mile radius around Cranleigh - if, however, you’re an artist yourself and you’re just outside of this boundary and keen to join, we’ll be delighted to welcome you! We’re a bit different from other Collectives in that we’re multi-disciplinary. So we have visual artists, designers, musicians, print-makers, jewellers, dancers etc - the more diversity, the better.

What do we do?

# We have lively social get-togethers. These are arranged so that one month we will meet up for a general get-together in a local pub (we cover as many as possible during the year!), and the alternate month we have just started to arrange "creative" get-togethers.

This means that individual artists will have an "at home" session to which other members can come and join in; the aim here is to do something creative together - it doesn't have to be the at home artist's discipline even so can be something like a poetry evening or a story-telling evening, or making simple jewellery, sing alongs etc - evenings that hopefully will inspire our creativity as individuals.

The first ones we have on offer are an evening doing pottery, two months later there will be a voice workshop and two months after that a Bollywood dance workshop.........etc!

Socially, we also have a summer garden party and this year we're having our first big Christmas party - which will be a joint party with the Cranleigh Contemporary Choir.

# We’re keen to mentor new talent and also, therefore, want new artists to feel that they can come to us and get support and encouragement to take that first step to becoming a working artist.

In 2008, we had our first annual exhibition, but are now of the thought that although this was successful, we may do better with sales by getting involved with local festivals eg. the Guildford Festival.

# We are also of course keen to encourage collaboration between members - so far:

- two of our members have had a joint exhibition;
- we've put on a fundraising concert to raise monies for our community work;
- one of our members is acting as a life model for another member who is
preparing for an exhibition in London;
- two of our members have worked on a large-scale music project
- we set up a joint exhibition of work at Cranleigh Arts Centre in June 2008.

# we're also keen to raise money for local charities. So far we've raised £293, some of which has already gone to the local Wildlife Charity (Wild for Life) as this amount was raised by individual members of the Collective.

·We're also delighted to announce that Peter Gordon (PG) of local radio station, The Eagle, has kindly agreed to be our patron.