Empire community project week 8
June 23, 2009 Community
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Photos by Nick Landau
I’m Shauna O’Brien and have been working as an intern with Lucie Fitton (inclusion officer at Museum of London) on some of the Museum’s community projects. Today was our last day working on the Empire project with adult learners from Barnet College. Over the past eight weeks the group have been working on a piece of artwork inspired by Britain’s Empire for an under-floor display case in the new gallery space.
Judith Hope (the artist working on the project), Sousan Luqman (a tutor at Barnet College), Annette and myself worked on completing the waves. We measured out the position of the table and then worked out the placing of the waves. When we had everything right, we used double sided tape to stick them to the base-board. Lots of trimming was required, but at last they were completed, a victory that received a round of applause from the group!
Judith has been embroidering the silk tablecloth for the tabletop and it looked incredible. She used coffee-coloured cotton to stitch with and it looked great with the different sepia tones of the rest of the work. She made Britain much bigger than Africa and India to show the dominance. It fit nicely on the table and the group could see it all coming together.
Lucie, Andre, Maria, Dan and Marion (a support worker at the College) all worked on decorating the crockery with transfers. The blue floral transfers were carefully cut into individual flowers and placed around the crockery. It was really effective, and once glazed with pva glue they looked amazing.
Sousan, Lucie and Marion made some little boats to float across the waves. They used coffee beans, sugar cubes and peppercorns. They will add some interest to the base and are very sweet!
Everyone worked so hard today and it was wonderful to see it all nearly finished. We’ll get back together in a few weeks once the sugar cane table legs have been freeze-dried to finish off the rest of the piece. Everyone’s looking forward to seeing it in the Gallery and it’s been great to be part of the team.
One of the participants, Andre, wrote a blog for today’s session:
‘This was the last day for working on our project and there was a lot to do! We worked in two teams- one with the main display cutting the waves to the right length for the base. Another group worked on the ceramic objects. We stuck transfers on the ceramics to make them look carefully decorated’.