Empire community project week 7
June 16, 2009 Community
The group discussing ideas for today’s workshop.
Click here to see more photos from the project
Photos by Nick Landau
I’m Shauna O’Brien and am continuing my internship here at Museum of London with Lucie Fitton, the Museum’s Inclusion Officer. This week the students from Barnet College came for the seventh week of the Empire project, making an art installation using goods traded in the British Empire to be placed in an under-floor display case in the new Expanding City Gallery.
Last week the group finished decorating the waves for the base of the display and today they folded them to make the ocean more three-dimensional. Judith Hope, the project artist, worked with Sousan Luqman (lecturer at Barnet College) to cover the case of the case with tea-stained calico for the waves to rest on. The table at the heart of the sculpture is going to have sugarcane legs, and Sousan used a saw to cut them to the right length and angle. They are to be handed over to the Museum’s conservation department now to be freeze-dried for preservation.
Amongst the waves will be some small ships carved from ginger, so the group had a go at drawing pictures of ships, using illustrations as a reference. This will be continued next week. Annette and Sousan and Judith worked at gluing the waves onto the display base and had very coffee-stained feet by the end of it!
Judith had printed some decorative images of shackles onto silk, which will be attached onto the tablecloth edges. Nick, Marion (a support worker at the College) and Maria worked at cutting some bondaweb into circles to stick the tablecloth and images together. Judith had made a template, so it wasn’t too difficult to be precise!
As the session was going, the crockery that Lucie had ordered for the table setting arrived and the group was keen to have a look! The coffee set had a beautiful cream jug and sugar pot, and with them were some decorative transfers that Andre and Daniel cut up into smaller pieces. Next week we can embellish the plain crockery with these to make it more decorative.
Andre, one of the participants, wrote a blog for this week:
‘Today we used our hands to very slowly and carefully bend the waves into place. We had to be careful so that the sugar and tea didn’t fall off! We then looked at the ceramics that Lucie had ordered to place on the table. They were plain white but came with transfers which stick to the crockery when dampened. We had to cut out the shapes we liked to decorate the crockery next week.’
Next week is the group’s last working on the artwork. Lots of things are happening at once and it is so nice to see the group’s ideas become real and placing each element into the case is so exciting. We all can’t wait to see the final piece!