Ayesha Patel

I am currently part of the Bow Arts Artist Educator programme, delivering creative interventions in primary and secondary schools across South and East London. These range from classroom-based workshops to public murals and commissions, all centered on creativity, collaboration, and inclusion.
In 2019, I volunteered with the ANKAA Project in Athens, teaching jewellery-making to displaced communities as a tool for knowledge-sharing and economic empowerment. We transformed an unused space into a jewellery workshop, collaborated with carpenters to build benches and storage, and crowd-funded to equip the space with hand and power tools. The project aimed to break cycles of unemployment through craft and skills development.

Discussions on natural materials, decolonial craft practices, and creative futures permeated the space in the spark of meaningful connections and transferable skills for people to carry and share forward.
Most recently I worked at Small World festival in Ashford with a small collective to run an outdoor masking making and upcycling stool. We combined all our found materials and formed a space where people could come and make new wearable costume pieces inspired by our surroundings or breathe life into old clothing.

Selected Projects:

St William of York Primary (Honor Oak): I co-led a mural project focused on the local ecology of One Tree Hill. Children learned about the significance of oak trees and engaged in drawing and storytelling during a field trip, contributing to a textile mural for their school.
Key Stage 3 Workshop (Limehouse): Inspired by seabirds and Limehouse's fishing heritage, I guided students through a sensory clay workshop responding to artist Miyuki’s Albatross project. Children placed their clay birds in the outdoor flower beds to “live” among non-human kin — a moment of tactile, instinctive connection to nature.
Swecha Farm (India): I led a waste-to-art children’s workshop, turning plastic pollution into creative resources. I also introduced natural dyeing using local flora.
Blue Oasis (Mangalore): I taught natural dyeing and jewellery-making using foraged natural materials like stones and twine and leaves, giving new life to these materials as a tactile and alchemising process.