About Us
Over the Moon is a social enterprise dedicated to providing events and activities in the district of Adur in West Sussex, with a focus on creativity and community. It started life in 2011 and evolved to become a registered form of social enterprise called a community interest company in 2017.
We are passionate about the joys of making and getting together with other people to be creative in a social setting.
We strive to tread lightly and for our activities to decrease rather than generate waste. We are strongly committed to using salvaged, donated and recycled materials wherever possible. We aim to showcase what can be achieved and what fun can be had by creatively reusing materials instead of buying new and throwing things away.
We aim for our events to be participatory, inclusive and locally focussed. We collaborate with other local organisations and love to celebrate our local area.
We rely heavily on volunteered time and local expertise. If you are interested in volunteering with us or collaborating with us, we'd love to hear from you! Just drop us an email at weareoverthemoon@gmail.com.
We have been running The Circular Space community creative reuse hub in Shoreham-by-Sea since April 2022.
These are some of the people involved in running activities at The Circular Space:
I'm Emily. I'm a director and cofounder of Over the Moon (as well as chief designer of giant rainbows!). I set up and now manage The Circular Space.
I have a lifelong creative reuse habit and am passionate about spreading the joys of breathing new life into unwanted materials. I love to collaborate and bring people together for creative projects.
I'm Liz. I'm a director of Over the Moon and involved in running The Circular Space.
In 2009 I completed my degree in Mixed Media Textiles. I am passionate about reusing textiles and wrote my dissertation about sentimental items and their importance.
I'm Gill, running a creative markmaking session in the picture here. I am a director of Over the Moon.
I trained in Stage Design and for years ran costume departments at the two London opera houses. Since then I freelanced as an arts project/event production manager but have now retired which gives me more time to do my own work, design, painting, sewing, embroidery and textile art. With two friends I founded The Clothes Lab. We believe in reducing the amount of clothing waste by creative mending and recycling and run courses in this as well as the arty design stuff of course.
Hello, I'm Sarah. I grew up in a house that looked like The Scrap Space! My mum ran an art afterschool club from our back room and we were always creating homemade costumes, cards and gifts growing up. I have now continued this with my own two children...although I now try and store as much of the stuff at The Scrap Space as possible!
I am an experienced early years teacher and enjoy using loose parts and providing child led play experiences which has led me to run Creative Cow sessions at The Circular Space. I see opportunities for play and creativity in a whole host of random objects and love to help others see the many possibilities of reusing things that may have otherwise gone to waste.
Hi, I'm Debbie.
I have a degree in Visual and Performing Arts, a teaching qualification and experience of tutoring many different art groups.
My own work is based on celebrating the beauty of the natural world. I create paintings and drawings using key themes of florals, landscapes
and seascapes as well as people in everyday life.
My passion is for working from direct observation in the field. Paintings are vibrant and colourful using acrylic paint.
My drawings include fast, energetic illustrations capturing people going about their daily lives in ordinary, unsuspecting places. Typical scenes are cafes and parks, drawn quickly before the subject leaves the vicinity!
My name is Lucy. I studied at the Arts Educational school, where I found my love for sculpture, photography and all of the arts. I then went on to work in fashion , catwalks and editorial doing hair dressing and make up in London , Brighton and Australia. I worked at Pinewood and Shepperton film studios doing prosthetics and special effects.
Recently I have been focusing on my shoe sculpture and my Messy Maker classes .
I adore working with children and I love being creative and I think it’s important to let kids be free with their imagination. My ideas are always fun and I love to try using different techniques.
I look forward to meeting you!
I'm Claire and I'm an artist, arts facilitator/educator and musician.
I grew up in London, did some early art training there and then spent my young adult years working as a musician. When my son started school I returned to college to complete my training, studying Art & Anthropology at Goldsmiths College. I moved to Worthing with my family 10 years ago and began to design and run art sessions.
I have a broad experience working with young people - including those with neurodivergencies - home educators, families and adults; with museums, schools, festivals and other arts organisations; in outreach work and in-house sessions. I have organised large scale arts events, most locally for Sea of Lights in Lancing, made huge lanterns, designed and built 4 large mosaics for Victoria Park in Worthing, constructed several life size characters entirely out of recyclable materials for an installation at St.Paul's Worthing, amongst many other projects and workshops for myself and other arts organisations.
www.instagram.com/clairelemmon
I'm Mary and I do both gardening and poetry at The Circular Space!
I live with both autism and chronic physical health issues. I struggle with the physical work it takes to grow food on an allotment. I wanted to create an opportunity for people like me so have opened a small community organic container gardening project where we grow everything from organic seed in peat free organic compost in every kind of container. We are just beginning at our site outside The Circular Space. All the people who work voluntarily in the garden are autistic. We all love being outdoors and contributing to our local community. Our long term aim is to grow organic herbs, salads, vegetables and fruit to donate to a food bank and to grow specific crops to provide ingredient for fresh soup for people coming into The Circular Space in the autumn and the winter months. To read more about the project please visit our Facebook page.
I’ve been writing and performing poetry for 7 years. I find writing so helpful because it’s a place where I can safely express everything that’s happening for me in the moment. It’s like I’m having a conversation with myself. Performing the poetry I have written at open mic is both nerve wracking and totally thrilling. I love that people take the time after my performances to tell me how they relate to my words and are often emotionally moved by them. By both writing and perform I get to exercise great courage and develop my natural skills and increase my self confidence and I feel very thankful for this. I started hosting a monthly poetry writers group 6 months ago because I wanted to share my skills and encourage other Shoreham poets to both write and perform their work. We are a small group. who meet to write then read out to one another. From the feedback I’m hearing, the group members feel more confident about both their writing and performing in public
To read my poems feel free to visit my Facebook page.
We have been funded by:
