Upton Hall School Project

Currently I am working on a project with two of my friends on my course, Antonia Clarke and Amy Dabbs. The project incorporates studio practice with the demands of publication defined as presentation of work in a public context. Essentially the module is about beginning to consider how you place your work in a public context. It also asks you to consider how the context of the work, or where it is placed effects its meaning and how it is perceived. I have decided I wouyld work best in a group for this project as I am a team player and often find that other people's involvement and ideas really influence, challenge and inspire me to think more freely.
When we first put our heads together for ideas we knew that we wanted to create work in relation to the prject, but we also felt it would be more interesting to get others in on the project too. After discussion we decided to make the project into a community project, giving others the chance to help and direct the process of the project in different directions.

All we needed was to select and approach a target group/ audience... We thought a young audience would be suitable candidates and so we started to think about schools and everything kind of fell into place after this...

We were very fortunate to find that Upton Hall School jumped at the chance to let us work with them. Antonia previously attended the school so she knew mostly all the teacher's and how things were run and so she, in a way, was our gatekeeper.

We soon decided that the best plan of action was to run workshops in the school and Ms. Spears, after bringing us in for a chat, let us work with some of the students.

We wanted to choose a theme that the students could really get stuck into and explore in a variety of different ways. The theme of 'Place' came to mind, we could ask them to think about where they live, their town/ city, or their favourite place, a site specific place. This idea has worked well for many artists, including Maria Isabel Gaudinez-Aquilizan and Alfredo Jaar in their piece 'Passage', exhibited in the Tate for 2010's Biennial. An exquisite peice, they asked the people of Liverpool to create boats from cardboard boxes and displayed them throughout their gallery space.

In visiting the School to talk with Ms. Spears we immediately spotted a walkway surrounding the School and this became our 'Place'. After the talk with Ms. Spears we took a walk round it. It spans the whole way round the school (which is very big) and this gave us even more ideas to progress with.

We just really cant wait to get moving and actually started working on the project... Itchy feet!!
We look forward to getting the different views and perspectives from the students, we were very excited at Ms.Spears' enthusiasm with the ideas we put to her so far and it will be important to stay in touch with her as much as possible over the next coming months. She had her own ideas of what she wanted us to incorporate into the project (ie. the Religious background of the school) so we will now try to develop the project and get things off to a visual start, perhaps make a few sketches or even a scale model.