What's New

Joanne Saunders wins Churchill Fellowship
Joanne Saunders, recorder maker, is a mult-talented Convent tenant having expertise in tool making, wood turning & carving, oboe & recorder playing, scuba & cave diving and a recent Churchill Fellowship recipient. Joanne’s studio on the top floor of the Convent building is like a step back in time. Precision tools and instruments set the scene for a creative and industrious work space in which Joanne meticulously fashions Baroque Recorders from Australian timbers. Such is her passion for the instrument that Joanne won a place under the Churchill Fellowship program to visit Paris, Oxford, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Washington and New York earlier this year in order to study several museum-housed Baroque tenor recorders and visit other makers and players of the recorder.

The Churchill Fellowship has allowed Joanne to continue to develop her craft at a global level, expand her artistic and professional experiences and bring the benefits of her expertise back home to us. It is Joanne’s intention, through delving into traditional recorder-making techniques to keep lost musical art alive and create new uses for ancient methods of instrument making. Joanne says that she is "committed to working from original models and developing designs based on these instruments for use in todays world. It is important to me as a maker to work as closely as possible from the original that was designed for period music with a specific sound in mind".

Lentil as Anything
Members of the Board of the Abbotsford Convent Foundation have been holding discussions with representatives of Lentil As Anything (LAA) about the restaurant’s future on the site. The discussions began after LAA and its supporters expressed concern that the restaurant may not get a new lease when the existing lease expires in January next year.  The Board has assured LAA that no decision has been made on a lease yet and the discussions are focused on a process for LAA to submit a proposal for a new lease.

Below is correspondence and bulletins on the progress of the discussions;