Celebration!

On Friday we celebrated the culmination of the Undercurrents project in style at the newly refurbished Burnley Mechanics.  Arts Award certificates were awarded, we had a bit of time for evaluating the project and spent a bit of time talking about what the group might do next in terms of moving on to Gold Arts Award.

And then.... we took the Chocolate Challenge!  This is a new venture at Burnley Mechanics where basically you need to eat as much chocolate cake and chocolate ice cream as you can in 30 minutes!  Our challenges had been specially put together with sparkly blue fabric to resemble a beautifully tempting waterfall of chocolate - yum!  

As only Danielle and Shannon could make it to the celebration, Georgia and Mary gamely agreed to also take up the challenge with the girls.  (Ok, and I (Rachel) helped out a little bit too!)  We got stuck in and much cake-eating later our 30 minute timers ran out.  None of us actually completed the full challenge but Shannon was definitely the front runner!  See the pics below to see just how much chocolate the girls were faced with!  Everyone went home with doggy bags with enough chocolate to see them through the rest of the week! 

We're sad to see the Undercurrents project coming to an end as it has been such amazing fun.  Its been a new and different way for all of us to get to know more about Burnley and to appreciate the natural elements more.  We are aiming to build on this project with a new project taking inspiration from the natural environment in Thompson's Park.  We'll be working with Burnley College on a new Arts Award project with their fashion and photography students next year, subject to funding.  

Watch this space!

16th and 19th August - film editing!

Sorry more late photos!
I just wanted to post these few images of the girls editing their Super 8 films and working on their Silver Arts Award portfolios:

Undercurrents summer sessions at ARC (Autism Resource Centre)

From 30th July over four Wednesday session, artist Sophie Gibson and I worked with a group of young people with Autism at ARC in Burnley.
We decided to make a long river collage that the Centre can put up on their wall as they have so much fantastic wall space. Doing a large piece of work was also a good way to include a varying amount of young people who all had different needs and preferences when it came to being creative.

Here are a few early pictures of the river starting to take shape:

Then we looked at what kind of creatures live in our local rivers and illustrated them and boldened up the lines with black pen :

After doing some illustration we used magazines and books to create collages so we could invent some river creatures of our own. These crazy critters were then added to the river and the finished result is pretty spectacular I think!

26.7.14 Big Splash Event

I know this is a bit late but just wanted to post some pictures that I found of Angelica's badge making adventures during the Big Splash event in Burnley Town Centre.
Angelica was the only person who turned up...and she did a FANTASTIC job of working with a constant queue of little people!

Molly's Film

Molly wrote some monologues from the point of view of objects in and around the river and used them alongside her Super 8 footage to create this short film.

Mhairi's Film

Here is Mhairi's Super 8 film!

Shona's Film

Over the past few months the Undercurrents group have been working with Lucy Bergman to create unique Super 8 films inspired by the rivers - here is Shona's film!