Open between 11 & 4 on the weekends leading upto Christmas its well worth a visit if you're anywhere near Leeds. You can see some pictures from the private view on Friday night on the exhibition blog, and there is a review with a short movie here

Curated by Si Smith,who is also one of the team programming the Visual Arts at Greenbelt, the exhibition has works by several greenbelt artists past, present & future and has been supported by trust greenbelt.

photos by barnaby aldrick

We had more classes than ever this year covering a variety of subjects.

Jonah Mayfield ran a film workshop for all ages on the theme of 'time' Things moving at different paces: slow, fast, reversed.

He took 2 groups of 10 around several spots of the site and allowed them to film whatever they wanted, then edited the footage into a short film.

We also had a class on Digital Photograpy & Post Production  taken by Richard Shepherd & Henrik Dahle.

Here is the image created in the class & click on it to see all the images that were used to create it.

For those of you still yearning for a "Long Now" experience you should point your feet, trains and cars in the direction of Birmingham and check out an exhibition.

The Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery is hosting an exhibition of Craft and the Slow Revolution from the 17th October 2009- 4th January 2010.

The exhibition looks at how contemporary craftspeople respond to ideas about slowing down how we work and what we produce, and the importance of contributing to a more sustainable society.

Included in this exhibition is a giant wool hanging that will be partly created by visitors, and a family activity guide to find out more about the exhibits. The exhibition also includes film and photography.

It's held in the Waterhall and admission is free (my favourite word).

In the hub at the festival this year over 400 people came & did a self portrait, and we were busy all weekend scanning each one.

We have created some screensavers you can view & download here

All the drawings appear somewhere in each of these three sizes – 1680 x 1050, 1600 x 1200 and 1024 x 768 – just choose the dimensions that best suit your screen size. Layouts differ across the three sizes [ie a set that you can find in 1680x1050 probably won't also appear in 1600x1200 format] although not always……. so take a look & see if you can find yourself !

(by Simon Jones)

There's a problem though, sometimes. You come to get inspiration and it's easy to find. The artists are inspirational and so are the activists. The musicians can find the secret chord that David played and even the holy people can make you believe that being holy might matter. Greenbelt's creativity comes from its middle, its beginning and end.

But then. The artists are more artistic than you, and the activists more active. The holy people are holier than you and the comedians are funnier. The musicians play better than you and the poets are more poetic … sometimes, sometimes, it feels as if you can't add anything. Cant contribute, be part of it, join in.

But then and but then. Into this surfeit of excellence walks Billy Childish (a most excellent man). The trouble begins, he says, when people start trying to be successful with their artistic ability. Every artist is trying to get to the point where people applaud their special genius. It's the assumed part of creativity, that it's there to wow people, to impress them.

What rot, he scoffs. What nonsense. Either everyone is special or no one is. How does doing the thing that you're good at tell you anything about yourself? It's the failing that tells you that. It's in the failing that you find, and expand, your limits. It's in the failing that we reveal our true selves to each other, not in the triumph of our successes. Art – and religion, he adds – needs to be more than a cosy nest for the able.

Most days of the week this might be eight parts nonsense. His artistic failures sell quite well, after all. Even Billy knows, one suspects, that if you lined up everything he said against itself it wouldn't really add up. It would fail somewhat.

But today, when confidence leaks away in the face of a festival edifice of impossible achievements, it feels like a welcome corrective. Is the artist the master or the servant? Your skills aren't things to have confidence in, they're things to avoid. Having fewer of them might even mean that you're closer to self-discovery. Having weakness, you can read somewhere, might make you strong.

Fortunately, Greenbelt is full of people who have spent a lot of time failing. It's out there to find. In the meantime, do the thing you're not good at. Fail. Learn. Live a little.

Visionaries: working in the margins
Guided Tour

Wednesday 10th June
6.30pm – 7.30pm
£7.50 incl. wine
Wallspace, All Hallows On The Wall, 83 London Wall, London EC2M 5ND

This year Greenbelt is bringing Trust Greenbelt recipients Wallspace’s exhibition ‘Visionaries’, to the festival. Whilst at the festival there will be a couple of guided tours of it, and Malcolm & Meryl, Wallspace’s curators, have kindly offered to do a pre-festival tour of the exhibition for us as well.

Downland Discourse, Noel White. Photo: Torsten White

For more info on the exhibition & Wallspace, click here, or see below.

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Visionaries brings together artists working in this honourable and challenging tradition, which includes William Blake, Goya and Samuel Palmer – those who explore with passion the territories of the spiritual, the religious and the human condition. Their vigorous work spans almost 100 years. The exhibition will include works by a number of painters, who although they are no longer alive, are still hugely influential: Stanley Spencer, Cecil Collins, Norman Adams, Tony Goble and Albert Herbert. They are joined by contemporary artists: Peter Howson, Clive Hicks-Jenkins, Noel White, Paul Martin, Brian Whelan, the Chapman brothers, Billy Childish, Harry Adams and Adam Neate (tbc).

The prophetic tradition, with its history of dramatic enactment, is a rich one. Visionaries will therefore include a performance piece by Kit Poulson and David Shillinglaw will paint 'live' during the period of the exhibition.

The exhibition has been curated by Wallspace and will be on show at All Hallows on the Wall in the City of London from 20 May to 10 June. It will then travel to Greenbelt Arts Festival, at Cheltenham Racecourse for the August Bank Holiday weekend, from 28 to 31 August.