During my placement, I have being been supporting Hannah Gaunt, the Learning and Engagement Coordinator at The Turnpike, to design an Education Resource document. The main purpose of the document is to present resources related to the exhibition and support educators and schools to do preparation for young pupils before their visit.
Turnpike is a gallery which values the creativity of children. The gallery has being designing various workshops and programmes for students to engage with the contemporary art. Referring to the current exhibition, Wild Honey: Mary Griffiths, the resource pack focuses on nature, the mining industry, fossil, the local community, and English heritage. Wild Honey is a solo show of Mary Griffiths who is an artist from Manchester. She is interested in abstract and geometric art. Using her unique technique, she applies many layers of graphite to a wall to create a large-scale wall drawing in the gallery. Her idea is inspired by the experience of her residency in the past year at Astley Green Colliery, located in Lancashire, a disused mine in which she immersed herself in its landscape which includes nature and abandoned machinery.Hannah explained how, to produce a resources pack, there are some key points should be focused on:
About the Artist
About the Exhibition
Key Themes
Explore the Exhibition (Interpretation)
Suggested Activities
Recommend Resources and Links
Related Artists
By looking at these, students or other visitors are able to think about and discuss the key themes during their visit and back in the classroom. At the beginning of the resources pack, I start writing a brief introduction of the artist and the exhibition which teachers could understand: ‘Mary Griffiths, an abstract artist, is also a curator at the Whitworth gallery in Manchester. Her artistic practices and experiences of curating create a strong theme for this exhibition. Turnpike is fortunate to have one of her large-scale wall drawings as part of the permanent collection in the gallery. Wild Honey, which brings together the artist’s drawings, fossils, and objects from the colliery, explores the connection between nature, people, and history.’
Then, it comes to the interpretation section of the resource pack which is to provide questions and facts to guide the audience. For example, the exhibition’s title, Wild Honey, helps the audience to understand the curator’s perspective of interpretation about the show. The miners include men, women, and children working underground. Wild Honey is the name of the big graphite wall drawing as well which Mary wants to represent the invisible underground systems. Furthermore, Astley Green Colliery was a once busy working environment which has now been replaced by bees and nature. The exhibition title seems to indicate that the coal symbolises honey and miners symbolises hardworking bees, digging the treasure for their livings. The idea of using wild honey as the exhibition tile is interesting which makes a connection between mining industry and the landscape of the colliery. Also, ‘the worker bee’ is the symbolic sign of Manchester where the artist is from. In this section of the resource pack, it might be suggested that pupils think about how bee is used as a symbol of the miners.
The second part of the resource pack provides suggested activities and recommend online links which are thought to be helpful for students either to do in the classroom or visit other venues. One of them is the official website of National Mining Museum Scotland, which provides a Kid Zone page with activities for children to do such as creating art in terms of responding the mining industry. In addition, it is worth linking other artists whose works are related to the theme. Therefore we put together artists such as Tom McGuinness and Norman Cornish to compare how each artist represents the mining industry from different points of view and different practices.
Once I had compiled this initial research, I disseminated it to Hannah for her to adapt into the final pack, supporting her with the amendments, sourcing images and further research as this progressed. By doing this project, I have learned how the gallery achieves the learning and engagement programme. The exhibition resources pack is helpful for teachers to find out more about the key themes of an exhibition, and use it within the school curriculum. It seems important to produce a pack to lead the young pupils to interpret and enjoy contemporary art for themselves.
Link to Mary Griffiths' Exhibition at The Turnpike: https://www.theturnpike.org.uk/marygriffiths