Art Work puts Heritage in the Spotlight
Six Art Foundation students have unveiled an installation of their work in Darlington town centre. Their work focuses on aspects of Darlington’s heritage and can be seen in Buckton’s Yard, between High Row and Skinnergate.
The work forms another part of the ‘Art in the Yards’ collaboration between Darlington’s Town Centre Management Team and the College which now is in its third year. This year’s themes have been inspired by Darlington’s well-known historical buildings, people who have lived in the town, maps and little known facts.
Justin Ramsden, who has a passion for Lego, has dedicatedly created the façade of Barclay’s Bank using thousands of tiny pieces of Lego. It will be a delight for children and adults alike to explore, for as well as being an exquisite representation of Victorian architecture, it also contains humour with little figures such as Amy Winehouse, a busker with puppets and a business man speaking on a mobile phone. Down one side of the building can be glimpsed a workman on a ladder and a cheeky skeleton.
Charlotte Clewlow has produced a layered panel that uses local maps and landmarks but, when you look more closely, streets and locations have been shifted around and different places created.
Joe Cocking, who is fascinated by typography, has taken one little known historical fact about a fire that struck the Yards in the past and created a panel using hard-painted decorative letterforms to commemorate the event.
Jessica Everitt has created a clever layered Perspex design of a head and names; James Mckeown produced a mixed media photo-montage inspired by documentation from a census and James Snook has created a figurative painting illustrating the gateway to Tees Valley with a Saxon warrior.
Rita Smith, Director of Studies for Creative Arts says:
“The work produced by our students this year has been inspired by aspects of Darlington’s history. Each panel has been carefully created, with many hours of dedicated work going into achieving exciting imagery that is rich with painstaking detail. We hope that people will enjoy discovering these new additions in Darlington’s historic Yards”.
July 1, 2010