I’m a fine artist, primarily a painter, and I’m also an arts educator working with schools, communities and running corporate training for businesses such as Confused.com.
My interest in science has grown from my painting practice where I became fascinated by working with transparent glazes. Over the years this evolved into experimenting with resins, and this year, I received an Arts Council grant to run a science-art crossover project to explore the potential of industrial resins as painting materials. This culminated when I found a industrial polymer chemist willing to assist me; he would come to my studio and I would learn the procedural rules from him, and then proceed to ignore them as I was keen to explore artistic potential discovered through accidents.
Frequently my experiments would fail dismally, but at last I was able to create a body of work to exhibit at Llantarnam Grange. This exhibition received the highest number of visitors at the venue for 5 years, proving just how popular such science-art collaborative projects are. Plus I participated in a live internet discussion with the polymer chemist, live radio and gave a number of talks about the work. The whole project opened my eyes to the potential of science within arts and made me see how effective the arts are to opening the door to science access for all.
So this is one of the reasons why I began to look at science through my arts education workshops.
I'm going to give you an example of one such project working with National Museum Wales, Cardiff. The project was called 'Just Bling?'; the brief was to design a workshop programme to introduce participants to the museum and it's collections, and to the theme of 'bling'. What is 'bling'? Is everything in the musem 'bling'? Why? Participants would then be asked to create their own visual response for exhibition at the end of the project.
Participating groups were young people aged from 10-16, mostly from ethnic minority backgrounds, and young Muslim mothers.
My initial challenge was to get participants comfortable with the idea of visiting the museum, engaging with the collections, and spending time within the museum environment. To facilitate this I organised a series of tours around various collections run by expert museum staff.
The collections I selected for each group to look at contained common ideas in order
to guide the group’s making activities in a rough direction. Although the
making was child/participant-led, I was keen to encourage an overall theme to
make the project and final exhibition cohesive. So for the first tour I arranged for a visit to the Natural History collection to look at beetles
and insects, and learn about their protective colourful shells, and also the
colours and camouflage of sea-life. This also included a specimen- handling
session. The same group’s second tour was around the Tudor Portrait collection,
specifically looking at the costumes worn, their symbolism and meaning, and
linking these back to what we had already seen in the natural world
(protection, camouflage, attraction, warning, status).
Following each tour I held a short taster session within
the museum where participants could try their hand at learning an art/craft
skill linked to what they had seen in the museum that day. These were aimed at
encouraging the participants to attend further sessions, and also teaching them
a technique which they could use later on in the project.
The outcome of the project was that all artefacts made were exhibited in the National Museum
alongside the pieces from the museum collections which had
provided the inspiration, and the participants own written interpretation of the project.
We held an exhibition
opening party for the community groups, and the show was also open to the
public, providing the participants with validation for their work.
Feedback was excellent, with many participants continuing to visit the museum long after the project had finished. This includes those who had never set foot inside the museum prior to 'Just Bling?', so the goal of using the arts to widen museum access was more than achieved.