Creative Metalworking Weekend Workshop

Dates: Saturday 11 and Sunday 12 October 2025 

Time: 10am – 5pm 

Location: Cobden Works, Salford, M6 6WF 

The weekend is aimed at women artists and welders with some welding or creative metalwork experience. Whether professional, semi-professional or lapsed, the focus will be on developing your practice, learning approaches to working at scale, and exploring design and fabrication for installations and kinetic structures. 

The workshop is supported by Walk the Plank and GMCA, and is therefore offered at no cost to participants. 

How to apply: 

Email [email protected] with the following: 

• A short description of your experience 
• Why you would like to take part 
• Confirmation that you live in Greater Manchester (include address and phone number) 
• Any access needs you would like us to be aware of 

Deadline: Friday 26 September 

Felix Rowberry is an artist, fabricator and facilitator who makes large scale and impactful metal sculptures and has devised metalwork and special effects for shows like Doctor Who, Top Gear and X-Factor. Felix has worked with Arcadia and on pyrotechnic displays across the country. 

In 2024, Felix was one of three artists who were commissioned to make work as part of our Mechanical Marvel series. Standing at 9m x 5m, In the Balance features large orbs of fire, rotating around a central column. The creation combines playfulness, storytelling and scale to engage people with the idea of a universe held in balance. Reminiscent of a child's mobile, its perfectly balanced rotating spheres depict children’s designs, cut out in steel... which might provoke thoughts on climate change and the weight of responsibility thrust onto the younger generations.

In the Balance was created after engaging young people, aged from three to late teens, from the Bournville, Coronation and Oldmixon estates in Weston-super-Mare in fabrication and plasma-cutting workshops, where they creatively explored and made art about issues that mattered to them, empowering them as agents of change.

Felix has now been commissioned by Walk the Plank, made possible thanks to the generous support of Billie Klinger, to produce another fire sculpture, which will be unveiled later this year.