Community arts group awarded grant to boost its workshop and gallery space

Published: 28 October 2021

A community arts organisation has been awarded a grant by the City Council to help it create a workshop and gallery space in the city centre.

Magic Carpet’s Inky Fingers Print Workshop is a repurposing project with high environmental and social values, making notebooks from old hardback books due to be pulped, and gift tags from unused office surplus.

These are then sold to raise enough money to run the group, which helps people with learning disabilities and mental health issues.

The plan is to base the facilities in an empty shop unit at 27 Paris Street, which will be converted into a workshop and gallery space, with the help of a £9,600 grant from the Council.

A spokesman for Magic Carpet said: “We’re grateful to have been awarded a grant from Exeter City Council to develop Inky Fingers and our premises in Paris Street.

“We’ll be creating a workshop and gallery space for the benefit of our participants, and the wider community, and to showcase their artwork.”

Magic Carpet is making the unit in Paris Street more accessible for participants to use all of the facilities.

It is hoped the building will allow it to welcome a more diverse range of participants; exploring new product ranges; hosting community engagements and workshops; providing rentable space for other creative industries and deeper partnership working in the sector.

The combination of a gallery at the front of building and workshop at the back will it will be able to support the full scope of artistic production to realisation and exhibition all in one building.

In addition to the work Inky Fingers is engaged in, Magic Carpet is keen to use the space and gallery for other community arts based workshops, and develop a programme of exhibitions.

Since 1981 Magic Carpet has worked in Exeter and surrounding towns offering a range of creative arts activities to those people who don’t usually access the arts because of difficulties with health, disability or their social circumstances.