Fifty Familiar Faces was one of our first community projects which was so loved and impactful that we continue to revisit it. 2020 we first collected 50 portraits of local familiar faces with a small stement of what amazing things we had found out about their live from meeting and talking with these individuals. Our idea was to help build a community by aiding conversation and interest in the familiar faces we all pass by each day.
in 2021 we extended the project after artist Mark Chettle and musician John Thorne got involved. They interviewed 20 chosen older residents of Monkton Village drawing out their wisdom and experience and wove it into a piece of music they composed. Mark painted fantastic portraits and when all put together in an exhibition arouse strong emotions amunst visitors.
Today in 2026 we are now revisiting the project aiming to add to it with portraits of the local musicans and more photography portraits of locals, musical bands and artists. We are also aiming to seek funding so that a coffee table style book can be produced as a piece of modern day social history of this remarkable community. 

We performed as the 'Shantty Harmonies In The Sea' (S.H.I.T.S) singing a protest song about the sewage in the sea. We are in the process of making a protest music video. Emma did a sponcered 'Dip A Day' in October to highlight how many days we can not get in the sea safely. She has also, along with other local people from our community have visited the southern water plant and being  trained to do water testing. We have also worked with Surfers Against Sewage to display their work during the bioshere festival 2025

This is a project we are still working on in terms of design, permissions and fundraising. We have had recent discussions with the islands brass bands to get help with fundraising.

See our dedicated site to this project

In the news 'OnThe Wight' 

43 skate decks were produced by island artists to raise money for a new skate park in freshwater. After the launch they were displayed at different locations to promote the project. Monkton Arts was lucky enough to get six to display in our shop for the first 2 weeks of May 26. 

The project raised over £7000!

We were lucky enough to get a days visit from The Coat Of Hope. Many members of the puvlic had a chance to wear it and learn about it. To find out more click here

local man Barrie Michell has had a remarkable carear in comic illustrating. We thought this deserved public recognition so we curated his work into a public exhibition. 

Jenna delivered a six weeks arts class, working with 9-16 years to produce work inspired by our studio artists, together with a 2 week public exhibition. 

As Jenna was the Deputy Mayor of Ryde we got involved in the foundations of setting up the Memorandum of understanding with The University of Portsmouth and Ryde Town Council to help more collaboration and mutual benefit opportunities stretching over the Solent. We signed the agreement in the centre of the Solent. 

From this agreement we formed the Knowledge Exchange Project
Follow the link to find out more about the 16 wider community projects we supported through this programme. 

University of POrsmouth reimagined Appley Tower based on the Biosphere reserve and the MA story of the Monkton Merman. We have been working with UoP's Architecture department for a few years now and it has become a first year project.  

Please visit the knowledge exchange website 

Please visit the Biosphere website

This book by local artist is a mix of traditional jordanian ceramic tecjniques and the story of how he can to set up studios and education programmes to teach these techniques for modern jordanians and to bring them back to England. 

We thought this was a valuable project to deliver to the community for free so we made him a website, delivered a book launch and authors interview as well as we sell his book in the shop. 

Please see his website 

Artist Alex Williams painted 600 paintings to illustrate Dylan Thomas's Poem read by Richard Burton under milk wood. It had been launched and shown nationally but never alongside the paintings. We curated a set of paintings showing the poems characters. 

We asked children from a local school to draw a picture of their favorite place, animal or plant. We then used a local business Island Composite  who offer their services for free to cut the children's images into wood and make into a Christmas tree decoration for the Brighston Christmas Tree Festival. 

While we were managing Appley Tower we organised The Fairy Tower. It was a story telling and activity experience for children to help them learn about the true magic behind natural science in our Biosphere in a wonderous and accessible way. 

We got involved with the IOW steampunk festival, organising an art competition and exhibition as well as being the venue for the end of the steampunk procession

We worked with Stonecrabs Theratre Companys  Out On An Island Project and Rainbow Island to deliver this community quilt. we went into schools and delivered comunity projects and then constructed this quilt which can be added to. It has since been displayed all over the Island and continues to be added to

www.rydebanners.art

Each year we take part in the biosphere festival and do all we can to promote what the biosphere is and to promote the 9 principles. 

News - Observer News Article  

We were involved in connecting Robin to the local schools we  regularly work with and we hosted the exhibition of the final works produced for the children from 4 different schools.

This was a joyous celebration of all things WOOL from contemport installation artists to traditional techniques. Courses, talks, exhibitions, opprtunities to sell.

View The Ryde Academy Creative Biosphere Website

We were delighted to be asked to produce a piece for this Arts trail funded by the police and crime commissioner for safer streets for women. We launched the trail for 'Community Murals' - Please see the full map and RTCs site here

To raise money for the local ballet school 

Giving the students a chance to publicly perform and showcase their talents and learning. We have done this on a regular basis. 

The archetectual students took the monkton arts invention of a new legend, The Monkton Merman as inspiration to develop a new public furnature piece around Appley Tower. We curated their final pieces into a public exhibition and hosted the students presentations 

The Gentlemans Rideout is an international event to rais awareness of mens mental health. Riders dress in tweed, take a planned route on their bikes together and on the IOW we hosted the final destination and made it a community gathering with Pulled Pork burgers, music and a meeting place. 

With the view to widen the reach of interest into the arts and cultural scene we curated an informative exhibition about the many ways of trasport in and out of our gateway town of Ryde. 

Combining history, engineering, artists, traditions and community. 

We formed an arts collective of artists from or working in this imidiate aera of Monkton Village called the Monkton Village Artists, The MVA's. We have had group exhibitions and the artwork by the MVA's was used on our first set of Ryde Banners 

It is a hugely diverse group with an age rage of 8 - 84 years from all different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds 

This remarkable piece of art fetures handprints of musicans who played each of the origanal isle of wight festivals. 

We helped to install the piece in it's long term home in Ryde and curated a surrounding display of its creation in collaboration with the artists. 

One local lady has filled her house with over 80 dolls house. We hosted a selection in a popular community exhibition showcse. 

We organised a fundraiser and the mayor of ryde Michael Lilley to dress up and perform a song in in aid of raising finds for a local mens mental health group - Men Only

I was enabled to go to Florence as part of a University of Portsmoth sustainability trip to teach and lean about creativity as a teaching aid to sustainability.

For a couple of years we ran as the islands Pop Up Gay Bar for Queer And Now, offering an inclusive and safe space. 

We have also supported Rainbow Island and Stonecrabs theatre company with regular monthly coffee mornings and community projects and exhibitions. 

We swapped artists work with Hastings independant gallery The Dirty Old Gallery (The D.O.G) to put together this exhibition spreading the names and works of local artists from both places often isolated seaside communities lacking exposure of their local talent. 

We had an evening of talks with Hunter Davies talking about his time with the Beatles. Ray Faukes interviewed by Peter Harrigan talking about the first IOW festivals and Andy Knight giving a history of IOW music origins. 

Sara Kuvaritakis was a local artist who sadly died before we opening Monkton Arts, but another local artist Mo Martin safed her prelific amount of art and catalogued it for the use of the community. We named our smaller gallery after her with the idea that it would be proiritised for children The Sake K children's gallery. We took some of her work we felt would be most insprational to children and made them into educational packs similar to story sacks but with art. We added books, dressing up cloths donated by the local Shrilancan community and music CD's to go with different paices of her art and sent them into schools, homeschool communities and a earl years nursery. The different groups produced creative writing, yoga activities based on her cat art, music, paintings, drawings and mixed media artwork. We had an exhibition to celebrate the childrens work and to advertyise the packs to more local schools for them to be used freely throughout their curriculum year. 

For more info on John see our John Ackroyd Award website we made to go with our commissioned award Here

John was a local inventive engineer who worked on projects such as the hover craft development, the first electric car, the speed records, Richard Branson's space balloons and the Beijing Olympics as well as many more. He was also a long standing member of our Ryde sands deckchair boys! 

When we put this exhibition together many items and origanal blueprints had never been seen in public and he had recieved little recognition of his achievement. In late stages of dementia, with the help of his supportive carer she managed a public talk and powerpoint presentation. 

For this fundraiser the island's soup kitchen worked homeless people and their small group of volunteers to cook this indian curry made with food donated from local supermarkets. We organised a sitar player and we performed the story of Diwali naratored by a lady from the idian community who came in full sari. The evening was a huge sell out success with all the money going to local soup kitchen. 

Throughout the years we have organised many art markets, from indoor to outdoor, christmas and street parties. We take any opportunity to offer space for local creatives to sell and for locals a more diverse rage of items to buy than the highstreet mass produced inported goods.  

We raised money for a difibrillator to be stationed outside Monkton Arts. We have a lot of people in the area who are retired  and are in an industrial area where the risk of accidents is higher. 

To celebrate the catholic Mexican festival of Day Of The Dead, with the outcome of making death a more talked about and proccessed topic,  we worked with Mountbatten Hospise to put together an exhibition of art therapy work produced at the hospice, to displayed a traditional offerender for the public to bring in loved ones items and dreassed up for a spoken word event which gave stage for peoples stories and poems which tackle the often taboo subject of death. 

We started this in the 9 months we were open in a little cafe round the corner where our community building organically started. We gave 5 mins to local people to introduce themselves, their creative practice or their interesting backgrounds. 

We did this regularly with about 4-5 people each time and we found that once people knew a bit about each other they had things to talk to each other about and so the community grew. 

When we first opened, to mark the opening of the childrens Sara K Gallery we embarked on an ambisious project to get every child of a local 2 form entry primary school to each produce a piece of work. Their headteacher was leaving the school and education to be an artist so it seemed a perfect project to celebrate both events. The 420 pices of work were judged and 

During Lockdown - 2019 when people couldn't access art galleries Mo Martin, a local artist had the idea to turn the whole village into an art gallery for people to walk around and view.

We asked people to place a piece of artwork in their window seen from the streets with the bright yellow marker to draw attention to people that it was part of the village gallery. It recived lots of positive feedback at the time. 

During Lockdown 2019

Organised by local gardener of the royal parks london, Mike Fitt. As the council struggled to palnt and water public gardens the call out went to the community to come and help. We ralied our Monkton Arts community to answer their call and the public gardens florished.  

Click Here For The Basic Politics Website

We realised that with regards to local politics, 'Most people think this is common knowledge, However, most people do not know this stuff!' so we made a website to explain it, to encourage people to know what was going on in our town, to vote and to maybe even take a step into politics. Through Jenna helped for an independant party 'Our Ryde' who went on to take the majority be a lot more representative of the demographic of Ryde and to get culture and community back into the town. Jenna became deputy Mayor for 2 years before stepping away to be more productive through her role of creative director of Monkton Arts.

During lockdown while indoor events were all cancelled we brought music back with out door gigs with a festival feel and safe distancing at Dawn and Duncans field on longlane. 

Post Covid Exhibition of chidrens work created in lockdown or in responce to lockdown. Organised by local Councilor Karren Lucioni 

To celebrate Captain Tom's 100th Birthday we gathered the community in a covid safe way to make 100 sandcastles on the beach wall all with a Captain Tom flag. Lots of the community came to help of all ages and the RUg band came to add to the joyous event with some music.