Author: info

New art exhibition now on display running throughout March and April 2022 by Tanaz Assefi, Iranian Fine Artist & Painter.

“My greatest passion is the ‘art of expression’ on canvas using my chosen materials, be it pencil, paint, collage or physical making.”
Tanaz was born and raised in Iran, a land of contradictions where deserts and forests are a few miles apart; a land of snow covered mountains and green valleys where palm trees and apple trees grow only a few miles apart from one another. The extraordinary geographical and historical conditions have deeply influenced its culture and people.

Traditions and ceremonies are intertwined with an exotic blend of symbolism and metaphoric language; which is visible in our literature, art and handicrafts…

“…this is my heritage and a part of my being. As an artist, I have always been in search of a relationship between the mysterious and symbolic world of ideas and allegories which take place in mythology, poetry and dreams.”

Tanaz Assefi’s art is mainly based on her visual dream diaries which she’s been keeping for a number of years; where she expresses her inner self, dreams, memories and reflections.
Tanaz has a studio at Thames Side Studios, an artist community located next to the Thames Barrier.
www.tanazassefi.com

Our What’s On Spring 2022 Magazine is out now, pop in and pick up a copy or read online via issuu.com

Find out more about the activities and events that take place here which fall broadly into the following four sections:
Children & Learning
Arts & Leisure
Health & Wellbeing
Social Inclusion & Reach Out

We are delighted to welcome back the Aperture Woolwich Photographic Society members after such a long time for an exhibition of photographs of the finest quality.

The Society who meet weekly for training and mutual support have long set the standard for the best possible work made at a local level.

Come and enjoy their work during opening hours at Mycenae House throughout November and December.

Visit www.woolwichphotographic.com to find out more about the Society.

We are part of Royal Borough of Greenwich’s Greenwich Get Digital Loan & Learn Scheme, where Royal Greenwich residents can loan a tablet for four weeks, as well as accessing free digital training.

How to loan and learn

Royal Greenwich residents can apply direct at local participating community centres and organisations to borrow a digital device and/or secure training and skills.

Each site will be provided with devices (tablets or laptops) which will be loaned out to individuals for four weeks. Similar to a traditional library, the equipment will be checked in and check out, with pre and post evaluation surveys to ascertain improvements on skills and training. The equipment will be remotely data cleansed and cleaned after each use, ready for the next person.

For further info visit www.royalgreenwich.gov.uk/digitalloanandlearn

Contact mark@mycenaehouse.co.uk / 020 8858 1749 to enquire about loaning a tablet from us.

Ian Cook has been a professional photographer since the mid 1960s.

He was born in Brighton and his first employment was with the now defunct Brighton and Hove Herald and also the Brighton Argus.  One of his early assignments was to photograph The Beatles who were on their first UK tour.  They hadn’t found fame at that time and so he went to the stage door of the Brighton Hippodrome where they were rehearsing and asked the stage manager for them to come down to be photographed, which they duly did.

He also persuaded Marianne Faithfull who was taking part in the first Brighton Music Festival to sit on a table drinking a cup of tea with Kenny Lynch and covered Ringo’s honeymoon in Hove 1965 with Maureen Starkey.

From there he decided to freelance in London and he got a scoop in 1967 when the staff at the Chinese Embassy attacked the police with baseball bats and a gun which landed him a staff job at the Daily Sketch. He was then one of the youngest photographers in Fleet Street.

After two years he decided to go back to freelancing and worked for the Observer and Sunday Times. A trip to the USA for The Observer Magazine led him to contacting People Weekly (a successor to Life Magazine ) which resulted in him becoming one of two photographers based in London covering the whole of Europe and Africa.

He has had over 5,000 assignments photographing subjects as varied as Dali and Henry Moore,  Rock Hudson and Liza Minelli,  Leonard Cohen, Sting and Tina Turner and travelling round Africa with Bob Geldof during the famine of 1984.

Nowadays he divides his time between Greenwich and Suffolk.

The recent pandemic lockdown has given him the time to sort through his vast collection of photographs and put them in some sort of order. From this he has chosen a number to be exhibited at Mycenae House during September & October 2021.

Prints are for sale as a limited edition of 25.

We at Mycenae House are delighted that we will have more flexibility to welcome more of you back to the house and broaden our programme of activities. However, and most importantly we will continue to put the safety and health of all our staff and users at the very top of our priorities.

To help our users and visitors plan and understand what is happening at the house in the coming weeks, here are six key pieces of information:-

1. Lifting of Restrictions – Covid 19 restrictions in terms of the type of activities are now lifted so we can accommodate all types of events including singing indoors, weddings and parties etc

2. Retaining Safety Measures – Mycenae House will continue with the requirement of visitors to wear masks in public spaces within the building, to sanitise/wash hands on arrival and at regular intervals, to keep distance from other members of the public where possible in public spaces within the building. User groups are responsible for and will set their own requirements for their activity within their rooms.

3. Summer Opening Times – Opening times remain as present until school holidays start week commencing 26th July when we will then open:
Mondays from 9am-10pm
Tuesdays to Fridays from 9am-5pm
Saturdays – 9am-5pm plus evenings when booked for private functions

4. Closedown – The House will FULLY CLOSE for a week from Wed 25th Aug until Tues 31st Aug inclusive.

5. September Full Reopening – We will re-open from 1st September at the following times:
Mondays to Thursdays from 9am-10.30pm
Fridays – 9am-7pm plus occasional evenings for live music events
Saturdays – 9am-5pm plus evenings for private functions
This will remain in place until December and we will update with any changes from January.

We’re thrilled to be re-opening further for Step 3 from Mon 17th May and welcoming more groups back, including many of our adult fitness, well-being and leisure activities.

Our updated opening times for classes and activities from 17th May until at least 21st June will be:
Mondays: 9am-10pm
Tuesdays: 9am-7.30pm
Wednesdays: 9am-10pm
Thursdays: 9am-7.30pm
Fridays – 9am-6pm
Saturdays – 9am-5pm

Visit our Regular Activities page for contact details of our Arts and Leisure | Health and Wellbeing | Children and Learning activity class leaders.

1. Re-opening from Monday 19 April and planned stages
2. Our Reach Out Projects
3. Improvements to the House
4. Sculpture Commission Opportunity
5. Summer Garden Activities
6. Staff, Governance, Money and Resilience

1. We are SO excited to be re-opening Mycenae House from Monday 19 April 2021
We are really looking forward to welcoming everyone back to the house over the coming weeks, until the point where there are no Covid-19 restrictions and we all have the freedom to do those wonderful and enriching things that we may have taken for granted pre-pandemic.

In line with the Government 4 Step Roadmap and in response to our users and community needs, what follows is Timetable for Reopening Mycenae House :-

STAGE 2 – Monday 19th April until at least Monday 17th May 2021
Opening times:
Monday to Friday – 9am -til 1pm & 3.30pm til 7.30pm
Saturday – 9am til 5pm
Please note we will not be open during the evenings.
Permitted activities – Children’s activities (up to 15 parents/carers) plus One to One Therapy Sessions .
The office will also be staffed on weekday mornings from 19th April.

STAGE 3 – Monday 17 May at the earliest we will be allowed to invite all groups and users back into the house including evening activities, fitness & well-being activities and some small scale social activities. The confirmation on the lifting of our own restrictions will coincide with the Government’s announcement on lifting its national restrictions

STAGE 4 – From Monday 21 June 2021.
All remaining restrictions should be lifted and at this point all of our normal activities will fully resume, including concerts, wedding receptions and parties. Again all subject to confirmation by the government.

Talk To Us
You know we are only too pleased to welcome you back and we encourage you to speak to us early, to talk things through and explore all angles and issues. Contact details are info@mycenaehouse.co.uk, 020 8858 1749, www.mycenaehouse.co.uk.
Our Continued Commitment to Your Covid-19 Security – for all visitors, users and our staff. We will continue to adhere to the guidelines including 2m distancing, wearing face masks, handwashing and other additional safeguarding measures for your safety.

2. Reach Out Project is Back Up and Running
Our award winning social inclusion project has a huge programme of activities and events to support those that are socially isolated and suffer poor physical and mental health and loneliness in our community. From May 17 the senior citizens drop-in cafe and digital inclusion workshops will resume. They will be limited in numbers to start with but we are excited to once again serve our wider community.
We have launched a fundraising programme to support Reach Out, which had previously been self-funded from any surplus made from running Mycenae House. Due to the year long Covid-19 pandemic our earned income has dropped by 87%, so until we rebuild our business model we will need to find external funding to support this work. Donations can be made here: https://gofund.me/2e283eef, please feel free to share this link.

3. You’ll Soon See How Busy We’ve Been!
Our volunteers and staff have been tirelessly working away to improve and maintain the House, particularly since January, which has included lots of painting, plastering, a brand new floor in the main hall, installation of new digital signage, a new digital workshop space, creating a new web site, new lighting and curtains, and we have installed lots of framed pictures of local interests in many of the rooms. We hope you notice the difference.

4. Commissioning Sculpture for Mycenae House
As a result of a very generous family legacy gift we have set about commissioning two sculptures to be sited in architectural coves at the front and rear of the building. The coves have lain empty since 1964 and we are delighted to open this opportunity up to local three-dimensional artists to create unique artworks. The commission is open to proposals from artists until the 21st June when a panel of three people will choose from all of the entries. More information is available from https://mycenaehouse.co.uk/2021/03/23/artist-commission/
The arts have also played a massive part in the lives of our people in the last year so it is wonderful to report that despite being closed, our exhibition of drawings by Isobel Kimberely went ahead at Mycenae House and via many many digital viewings, Isobel managed to sell all of the exhibited pictures. It was a stunning show and very rewarding to help in her success. We can also report that another artist we work closely with, Lesley Hall has been an award winner several times over since the pandemic started. Lesley teaches and leads several art classes at Mycenae every week and is a mighty fine draught woman, painter, photographer and jeweller.

5. Summer Garden Activities
As a plan to help our communities re-engage with one another and with us at Mycenae House we are planning a series of cultural afternoon events in the garden across the summer. It is a plan that we are just working on now but to give you a glimpse we are planning 3 live music picnics with Jazz, Classical and Folk and World Music, we are also planning three live events centred around dance and theatre and a family activities event. All will be free but will be ticketed and limited to 100 people each event.

6. Staff, Governance, Money and Resilience
We have retained all of our staff (doffing cap to the Furlough system), who mainly appear to be in rude health and are keen to get back to serving our communities. Our board of trustees remain supportive and resolute. We will be looking for new trustees to support and re-energise the organisation as we plot a new future so please do let us know if you are someone or know someone who could bring positive skills, experience and ideas to help us going forward. Financially the pandemic has hit all organisations hard and we are no exception (with income down 87% and costs only marginally lower than normal), however we remain resilient and financially strong thanks to our financial reserve policy and to the generosity of the furlough system and the Royal Borough of Greenwich council’s support for the Voluntary sector.

Congrats and Good luck to our staff and friends – The lockdown has obviously been long and provided more personal time so it comes as no surprise to report that three people we know and work very closely with have become pregnant and are about to have new babies. We can’t wait to meet our new little friends!

ARTIST COMMISSION – Submissions Invited

Mycenae House is delighted to announce the commission of two sculptures by local artists for permanent display on the outside of its building in Blackheath.

DEADLINE EXTENDED! Submissions by locally based and/or locally working artists are now invited until 19th July 2021. Artists are invited to submit initial ideas in the way of sketches and by also providing photographs of previous work along with biographical information.

Each artists submission will be considered by a panel of three people including the CEO of Mycenae House, a member of the funder’s family and a commissioning advisor. We are looking for two discrete designs to make weather resistant artworks that will sit within slim architectural coves – see photographs below.

The combined budget for the commission is £2500 in total, including delivery and installation.

Context
Following a legacy gift given by a supporter of Mycenae House, we wish to enhance the outside of building with original artworks. Mycenae House was built as a convent in the 1930’s and two statues of the Virgin Mary filled the architectural coves at the front and rear of the house. In 1964 the convent was closed and both sculptures were removed from the coves which have lain empty ever since. This generous funding is allowing us to fulfil a long-held desire to return the coves to their original purpose of housing sculptures that reflect the building and its function as a community space for all.  We wish for artists to have the freedom to respond to this artistic challenge as they choose, however we do not wish to commission sculptures that reflect its religious history.

Further details: mark@mycenaehouse.co.uk

Please view our website www.mycenaehouse.co.uk/whats-on/ to see the broad range of activities at Mycenae House.

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Mycenae House Update – Tuesday 23rd February 2021

Mycenae House welcomes the Government’s announcement regarding its Roadmap to re-opening society.

Our initial response is to simply recognise the key dates below within the plan which effect our organisation. They are:-

12th April 2021 at the earliest as a likely date for re-opening the house for children’s classes and activities plus other permitted sectors, probably on a daytime basis only (evening opening to follow later).

17th May 2021 at the earliest as a likely date for re-opening the house for indoor group fitness & exercise and other leisure activities, as well as cultural events with a limited capacity, both during the daytime and evening.

21st June 2021 at the earliest as a likely date for re-introducing parties, wedding receptions, social and cultural events without limits on capacity.

As ever we will re-open as much as we can, as soon as we can, including opening the cafe and offering outdoor activities. Please look out for clarification in due course.

As ever we are grateful for your patience and we look forward to welcoming you all back to the house.

Best Wishes,
Mycenae House