Beta site under development
The Kings of Carnival
Walking into Shademakers in Ryde, you could be forgiven for thinking that you’d stumbled into a Willy Wonkaesque scene. Minus the chocolate. An enormous, bejewelled crocodile is lounging at the side of the stairs and there are feathers, glittery fabrics and various fascinating birds and animals taking shape in the workspace.
Founded by Artistic Director Paul McLaren in 1991, Shademakers Carnival Club established a base in 1993 in Bielefeld, Germany and created the Carnival der Kulturen event, which in 2016 celebrated its 20th anniversary before relocating to the Isle of Wight in 2011. He and Creative Director Sharon George who joined him in 2011 both have extensive carnival careers spanning not just the UK’s Notting Hill Carnival, Thames Festival, and the Cultural Olympics to name but a few, but globally in far flung places as diverse as Nice, Port of Spain and San Fernando. Now as well as their recent past glories in the Queen’s Platinum Pageant, they have big plans afoot for the 1800s building formerly known as the Elizabeth Pack department store in Ryde and have secured significant funding to turn this large premises into a centre for the arts and artisans as well as to house themselves and a new theatre.
Shademakers see themselves as being active in the community rather than being community artists with ideas about how you address art and culture outside of a gallery space to take it onto the streets and this is where the original interest in carnival for Paul began. He moved from North Manchester, his home patch, to Bielefeld and began a carnival in Germany which was a direct reflection of the Berlin Wall coming down and which still goes on today. “We wanted to address new European culture with so many people from different European communities; it was about those ethnic minorities on both the East and West sides of the wall and this began an idea of what modern Europe was looking like and was an opportunity to reshape what carnival looked like in the modern age. During that time of toing and froing between Notting Hill and Germany we made many contacts, Sharon being one of those and in 2010 there was a project at the UK Centre for Carnival Arts where we were both a part of the team that worked with carnival artists collaborating together on a variety of projects and that’s where we got to know to one another.”
Sharon, who was already based on the Isle of Wight became interested with carnival at a more local level. “Here on the Island, we started to be involved with carnival back when my daughter Lily was four and still in primary school in early 1999 and there was investment made at that time by SEEDA through Ryde Development Trust directly into creating carnival in Ryde. I was also approached to apply for a job as a Community Development Officer which I did and began bringing carnival back up and working in the community which is how I met our other director Martin who was involved in building floats. I formed MAS FUSION as the region’s No 1 touring costume band to continue my artistic life and involved the local community in that as well as travelling to Europe and beyond which is where Paul and I met. I had some funding to invite an international artist over for a project on the Island and I approached Paul who came over to do that and then subsequently moved all of Shademakers here. And so those two groups came together – the very professional side but also the community side and that’s what we’ve continued to grow.”
Fast forward several years and many carnivals and one of the groups latest projects was creating Heraldic Beasts for the Queen’s Platinum Pageant. “We were well known by Adrian Evans who is the Pageant Master, “ says Paul, “And it was a development of that relationship which we’d had since Notting Hill. When we attended the parade, we knew all of the other performers from all over the country and we really felt that we were helping to put the Island on the map, perhaps more than it had been before. We’re very interested in historical facts – without knowing the past, you can’t anticipate the future, so because of the Island’s relationship with Queen Victoria, it seemed to sit quite naturally that we were continuing a jubilee tradition from when she would parade past this very building. You have to create signature in your work and how it looks and we’re proud of what we’ve created in a cultural identity way. The Island has the capacity to understand that because of its history of carnival but also to develop it into more. We created Hullaballoo in Sandown to do more of what we do off Island back on the Island and to enable us to get people into those spaces and landscapes where we’re often told that people aren’t needed. We’ve expanded our team, and everyone has learnt on the job, and we have Lily and now Joe Plumb onboard to not just facilitate carnival but to help with the overseeing of the building project.”
Funding for the redevelopment of the building has come from DCMS (Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport) – the Cultural Development Fund all based around cultural buildings and the team realised how important these grants are for the sort of building that they’re occupying with Sharon saying, “The bigger picture is that these sorts of successful applications will be presented to government to show how important these buildings are.” Paul continues, “ We’ve always concerned ourselves with art being made in spaces so we wondered what we could get that was adequate to do the job we want with our ambitions – like the space to build a life-sized galleon in to perform in festivals. We wanted space to make things monumental! We got very excited when Tim Guy, the owner of the building, wanted to collaborate with us and understood what you can do with a high street building when the retail element is gone; that it shouldn’t be lost to development into residential space but should be a building used by people as an undercover extension of the street. And on that basis the DCMS approved of our plans.”
And then it was onto the nuts and bolts of the plans themselves. Sharon says, “ We used architects Turner Works who reimagine buildings and spaces and their past work is incredible and are award winners for turning for example, a car park into a working space for artists. We approached them and they did a feasibility study which was fantastic – all there on paper for everyone to see and making the project much more accessible to others. The building going forward will have sixteen different spaces, we’ll occupy the top floor, and the rest will be used for artisans, makers and for a theatre. When we applied for the funding, we thought we might get half a million pounds and post Covid the DCMS had put funding in place for projects like this and put amounts into capital which is so important for projects which are involved with the regeneration of cities. Our relationship manager sent us a link to this, and we applied for it never imagining that we’d get the full two million pounds but applied through the council, as we’d done the feasibility study. We were therefore ready to go and the application which had to be applied for by the local authority was submitted by them as there were no other suitable projects.”
The building will not only will house artisans but will have a direct relationship with the public outside because of the literal shop window frontage where there will be artists in residence and will create a borderless dialogue between people inside and outside the building and act as a central hub for the arts. With the other spaces being occupied by other makers, this will create an integrated feeing throughout and bring the building back to life. The company are eager to get going with the project but will have to move out whilst the building is being renovated over the next couple of years and we all look forward to seeing this exciting story come to fruition in 2025.
