Today was back to Tullie House and our enthusiastic art group. Having been inspired last time with gallery and a site visit to Birdoswald, today it was down to the art with two more half-day workshops.
We began chatting about the Birdoswald visit and talked about the other Frontier Voices art projects and borders more generally. I introduced the idea and some basic techniques for embossing onto metal foil and everyone made a leaf for the Sill installation. Tina and Irene were so inspired that they made a number of ivy leaves for our artwork and the promise for more to follow as homework! We discussed if we should have a timber wall or should we think ‘stone’ as we discovered that Carlisle would have had a turf wall with a wooden fence above. This was news to everyone! However we discovered that the milecastles were probably stone and everyone voted to make our section stone and we would make it a piece of milecastle with stone detailing round the openings, where you see through into the gallery beyond and round the screen. The screen will show images from the project. Then we were off in the Frontier Gallery, cutting and piecing together a mesh armature for our work that fits into our installation space accurately. The armature then went to the community room so we could see the geometry of the wall we were building and start to create a fabric skin. We all took thin calico and fabric dye pastel sticks and went round the museum rubbing what we could from casts and handling artefacts making prints of the textures (art word - frottage). We also used mosaic and tile work from the building. These are going to form ‘stones’ on our Wall. Karen and Irene continued with this until all the fabric was used. Rob, Sue and Catherine had an amazing painting session - giving our fabric base an overall wash of stone coloured paint. The day had brightened up so we were even able to dry it outside! We thought a lot about words - the Birdoswald poetry - and in particular how that you could often think about opposites in relation to walls. Rob really got into this and soon he had a list, some of which we will incorporate into our Wall.
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I have just finished an amazing Zoom workshop with 25 Year 9s at Peutingen Gymnasium and their teacher. This is my third session with the school and second with the young people. We shared all the Frontier Voices projects so far and then they shared with me the sketches and preliminary work they have made for their cut-out portraits. They have really thought about frontiers and borders and have applied their thoughts to specific political figures, generic people and themselves who have perhaps been well or poorly treated by frontiers when they have been travelling and all originally inspired by our own Hadrian’s Wall and the European Limes.
I can’t believe that our first exhibition ‘Face-off’ is already coming down. Arbeia closes for the winter tomorrow so the work is moving to the viewing gallery at Segedunum to be seen by visitors this autumn. We swooped in and it was de-installed in a matter of minutes which proves that planning is everything! We had a great chat with the staff who have loved having the pots on display. Apparently people have wanted to buy them, find out who they were and how they happened to be there, so the staff said that they had been wonderful conversation starters for young and old. The visitor numbers have been amazing too!
Next it was in to Segedunum and it took about an hour to instal ‘Face-off’ in the viewing gallery. They have a great view of the fort site and if you look up at the windows from the car park you can just see some cheeky faces looking out! The identity pots will be here until the last week in November when they move to the Sill. Dr Anneke Hackenbroich and I had a very productive meeting with the leader of Young and Sweet, the Haltwhistle Youth Club.
We are working with 3 different groups on this project. They have been inspired by the Roman Army Museum and a visit to Magna Fort where they were introduced to the serious effects of climate change as the ground is drying out and how this translates into a measurable loss of their heritage as it continues. In ten or twenty years all the organic matter that tells of the lives of the women and children, eg. leather shoes, will have dried out and fallen apart as though it has never existed. They also saw where their work will be displayed in the Roman Army Museum from February until end of March and then it will move to its permanent home at the Youth Club. The plan is to have an additional banner made to display on the gate at Magna, to get people talking. Dr Nigel Mills and I attended the third zoom session with our Bavarian partners. This project has developed into us helping them choose a suitable topic and then advising on how to create a single poster to get people in their locality asking questions about the Limes and what it means to them. They want to make local people more aware of their cultural heritage, so this project will help to shape their future thinking. Sites and photos are now being chosen so it is coming together and I look forward to our final session in mid-October when we see the finished work ready for display. This is a ‘pilot’ piece of work so they can seek funding and develop it further next year.
We also had our next project meeting as Nigel is to be away and I caught up with Clare a week later as she too had been away. Clare and I spent a very happy evening working with Beavers, Cubs and then Scouts and their leaders at different points during the evening. We ‘shook rattled and rolled’ recycled plastic bottles and drinks containers containing 50:50 shredded paper water mix from the Vindolanda Trust until the fibres broke down into a sticky paste. We danced to music and had fun! The paste was then sieved through cotton into a tray and a sponge used to compress the fibres and remove excess water. Paper was then stacked between pieces of reused kitchen roll and boards to remain flat and safe until I could hang them up to dry in my studio. Once they were dry I halved them and pressed them flat so they were ready for use the following week.
I was back for more a week later with the dry cards. The participants were surprised at how thick the card was and the final finish, all ready for writing. Barbara Birley led a short session on the Vindolanda tablets and handling digitally printed artefacts of finds from the site. Items such as tent pegs and a child’s wooden sword, wooden shoes from the bath house and even half a toilet seat! The printing method meant that you could really feel the lines of the writing on the replica writing tablet. I put together a series for suggestions of topics that today’s Frontier Voices might like to think about and everyone wrote or drew at least one postcard. The Frontier Voices tablets included shopping lists, party invitations, text messages, local news, how people were spending their time and even imagining themselves alive in Roman times. I now have to assemble a structure that suggests a piece of building structure so, the tablets can become ‘stones’ in our Wall structure. Watch out for some pictures! Today was the inspiration day at Vindolanda and Clare and I met Vindolanda’s Curator Barbara Birley along with members of the Allendale Cubs and Scouts from Hadrian District. We followed a site trail, heard some fantastic, stirring music from Cornu and Cornyx played on instruments copied from frescoes. These are the real Roman war instruments and they looked and sounded amazing! Vindolanda have recently found a trumpet mouthpiece at one of their digs this year.
We visited the site for our proposed artwork in the education room, in the valley near the Nymphaeum, which is currently sporting nearly 1900 beautifully made pieces of bunting celebrating 1900 years of Hadrian’s Wall. I introduced the project to the young people and discussed what we would be making at their next meeting in their local village hall in the following weeks. The Vindolanda tablets really inspired us in the museum - seeing snippets of everyday life captured, shopping lists, letters home, camp stores, and a birthday party invitation written by a women - the first examples in Britain ever - amazing! Thinking about modern issues of climate change, recycling and repurposing we are going to make paper postcards from Vindolanda’s shredded paper and then write postcards relevant to today, inspired by the tablets. The cards will then be used to create a sculpture for display. Look out for more images to come! The Tullie House community project began with introductions from me and Catherine Moss-Luffrum and then a visit to the Frontier Gallery at Tullie House with David Gopsill. We had made a slit book sketchbook to make notes and, using mobile phones, we captured anything that interested us. We made notes about how we felt about frontiers and Hadrian’s Wall as a border. These are to be debated further in our next session in two weeks when we start to create the artwork for the Wall we are making for inclusion in the Frontier Gallery. I had organised a site visit to Birdoswald so I could share some of the poetry from the Birdoswald workshops. Also, the Tullie House participants could see the fort and the fabulous landscape at the Wall. Everyone expressed this using words, which they chose carefully: Peaceful, historic, strategic, prepared, drilling, organised, isolates, ordered, drilling, green We also visited Birdoswald because the finds from the fort are accessioned at Tullie House and English Heritage’s Learning officer Helen Klemm shared artefacts from their handling collection, which everyone enjoyed. I was particularly fascinated by Genius Colcullatus - a single hooded figure that may have been linked to Celtic deities. Apparently they normally appear in threes and Housteads have three, but they haven’t been found at all the Wall sites. We also saw three figures in similar (but not the same) clothing in the Frontier Gallery at Tullie House. There is something very tactile about this little stone sculpture and it clearly meant something important to the fort dwellers in the past. I discovered that he had a nickname: ‘Bert Oswald’! The Great North Museum officially opened the Frontier Voices Spotlight Exhibition. We had a small but select gathering from Great North Museum and Tyne & Wear Museums and Archives staff who had been involved in the project, plus Dr Frances Macintosh from English Heritage and Dr David Walsh from Newcastle University. The communications officer, Jonathan Loach took lots of photos and I hope that the Newcastle press will print something about the project in the next few weeks.
Today we had also hoped to run a Frontier Voices art and English Heritage workshop at the GNM where many of the original artefacts found along Hadrian’s Wall have been accessioned and displayed plus the Frontier Voices Spotlight exhibition and the installation at the GNM - so lots to see and much cross-fertilisation. English Heritage’s site at Carrawbrugh has a Mithraeum and we thought that this might strike a chord with people from Persia, Iran and Syria. Refugees from Newcastle were originally going to participate but called off at the last minute. A second group from Gateshead were asked to come along but they didn’t make it either at such short notice. Life as a refugee is so uncertain when people are trying to sort out their lives as they are being moved from place to place, so we all understood how difficult it is for them to commit and turn-up in these circumstances. We have set up another workshop for next week and hope that some participants will make this one as it will be third time lucky! Here we are planning to take a bus out into the countryside to see the Wall landscape and visit the Mithraeum, followed by an art workshop at the Sill and a look at the landscape near the Wall. Over a period of three weeks or so I have typed up the poems, queried names and wording with some of the writers and decided that these workshop writings need a wider audience. I played with the words from the final workshop and used the App ‘WordPack’. The image was the best one that I felt gave the most accurate feel for the site and the words Birdoswald visitors had chosen.
Clare filmed me making a slit book with the group, which will also be put on the Frontier Voices website. I will include the final version of the poetry in the Frontier Voices legacy section of my website but English Heritage have agreed to host the poetry and artwork from the Frontier Voices project on their website pages and keep it beyond the project, which is fantastic news and a really good way to share the project more widely. I hadn’t expected to spend quite so long on the literary output and I still have the banners to complete for the café area. I have now narrowed it down to 6 banners - one with standards and 5 with poems from the workshops, and drawings of my interpretations of finds from the site selected by the group on the second day. When the banner designs are completed in the next few weeks I will add them. to edit. |
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