Art Aware
On Friday the 8th of June, we launched our very first Art Exhibition!
This exhibition is an expected bonus to all of the work we’ve done so far with young people. As we have gone around the country delivering workshops from children to young adults about issues such as gender equality, refugee rights and privacy, we have had some really interesting conversations. The young people we have encountered were not only extremely open and intelligent, but also had a lot of worries and concerns for the future and questions for current events they are unsure who to ask.
It has been interesting how, as two young women coming into these places to deliver workshops, perhaps the fact that we don’t present ourselves as teachers, but rather as young people who are concern and want to talk about human rights issues we’d like other young people to care about, t we seem to have been chosen as an outlet for all these concerns.
We felt an extreme sense of responsibility for these concerns, and that gave us the idea to ask young artists to create paintings and other forms of art that would depict topics of special concern to the young people we’ve met - including ourselves!
The young artists came into a studio and were given a prompt each - with the topic they were to create painting about, they then worked for a whole day to create an art piece.
By having these worries represented as art, we felt a big barrier could be taken off the ability of people to interpret the issue.
With a painting the interpretation is very much to the person looking - they take away what they want to - and there is not much explanation, not long winded debate included- which can often make these topics too overwhelming to think about.
Rather, we wanted paintings and other visual art to be the medium as it would allow the audience we invited. - of other young people and indeed many adults - to decide for themselves what they think of certain things - we couldn’t resit however and included educational things
Below are some of the work exhibited, and the prompts the artists were given.
