30 July to 2 August 2024 – Feel Good Family Picnics

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Rochdale Borough Council’s annual Feel Good Family Picnics returned to Rochdale’s parks, full of activities, music, dancing, puppets and performances. Touchstones had two tents across each festival site – one sharing our Mini Museum with a selection of objects from our collection alongside a story teller who brought the history to life. Elsewhere in the parks, The Dining Room had its own presence with activities from our Creative Learning team and Local Studies, as well as workshops from artists Kyam and Aliyah Hussain.

Anyone attending the picnics could come and contribute to our evolving table top drawing, colouring in cups, plates and bowls on our printed table cloth, filling them with their favourite dishes. Across the four days, we coloured over 30 meters of our continuous table top runner with the likes of spaghetti, rainbow ice cream, piles of peas, a couple of caterpillars, slices of pizza, clusters of strawberries, bananas and numerous broccoli florets. We are keeping hold of the drawing and plan to use it (somehow!) in the new Dining Room space.

Throughout the morning, table top drawing artist Kyam joined us to talk about food stories and memories, sharing whilst colouring and imagining our past dinners and fantasy future foods. Complementing our tablecloth of drawn dishes, Local Studies shared some of Rochdale’s food stories, including holding the world record for the largest pancake ever made!

After the picnic’s lunchtime parade, we switched from drawing to creating clay sprig moulds as part of Aliyah Hussain’s evolving installation for The Dining Room. Children and families were invited to create their own sprigs, pressing clay into plaster moulds made by the community curator group back in May. After pressing and painting with coloured slip, all the moulded items of clay will be fired by Aliyah and become part of her suspended sculpture once Touchstones re-opens to the public.