A Perfect Day project brought together the members of Bicester Resource Centre and local pupils from Kings Meadow School to create a graffiti mural. The mural is hanging on the dinning room wall at Bicester Resource centre and is much loved.
To see the photos of this project see the link bellow.
http://beccart.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/a-perfect-day-in-action/
As we sped coughing and spluttering into our opening we were met with enthusiasm and a great deal of buzz.
We already have people wanting to come back and bring art. I can’t wait to carry on developing this!
Loving it.
Live art
Live music.
Wall art.
Space for young people to showcase and get involved.
Next week – marketing week. If anyone can help us to get flyers out and media interest then please please get in contact.
The YAK SHACK’s opening wall created by Krozza, Koas, Alican, Mr Bletch, Kleiner Shames and 1995
www.kleinershames.blogspot.com
www.1995lives.blogspot.com
www.adambletchillustration.blogspot.com
www.oyaptrust.wordpress.com
Posted in James Loraine-Smith
Tagged art projects, community arts, film, graffiti, OYAP Trust, video, visual art, young creative leaders
Today
You could say that I:
Managed, co-ordinated, produced, facilitated, enabled, collaborated, developed, engaged, introduced, planted.
This morning. My group of young people met with three older members of their local community at the Bicester Resource Centre. The centre’s artist led an art workshop that got all of them working with a material that was completely new to them: alginate. Three hand casts were made.
Everyone had a great time and next week they will come together again to start the real project work: a graffiti mural.
Everything went smoothly.
Planning is very nearly finished. Paperwork almost tied up and it is the beginning of the delivery stage. My first step to finishing something big.
On walking into OYAP Trust’s office at lunch time I was met with cheers and applause. A taste of a little triumph.
This afternoon I was scheduled to write the evaluation design. I put it back a few hours to have a leisurely lunch followed by some flute practice.
Last week, we had a session on ‘Making it Work: self employment in the arts’ with Juliet Brain, and it really I feel saw me turn a corner, and crystalised how much we have done and the potential of what we could do, both as individual artists and as a team. The beauty of the day was it was a real warts and all session about what life as a freelancer is like, from someone who has all the experience we could have wished for; and we were all made to really look at ourselves in terms of strengths and weaknesses, which is never an easy thing to do.. but it was amazing by the end how much it made me think and the confidence it inspired. We looked t what we already knew about ourselves – I knew my basic confidence lay in my ability as an artists and as an organiser, and my driving passion was equal for creating art and for providing other people with platforms and opportunities for their work as well as bringing this creativity for the public; but Juliet also asked us to write all our qualifications and experience on post it notes and stick them on the wall – the rainbow splurge that emerged made us realise that together we have a lot to offer! After a confidence boost, we explored the slightly more daunting side of arts as buissness – ie branding and copy write issues (arrrgh!), issues around child protection and partnership working (arrrrrrgh!) and tax (arrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh!), which made our brains hurt but I think really instilled in us a determination that we could and would get on top of these things and get them right in the future, backed up by all the skills that we realised we had in our tool box which really had been enhanced and added to by all we have done with the Young Leaders Programme so far. We also looked at the links that are out there for artists, big organisations like the Society of British Designers and the English National Youth Arts Network, and descovered all the advice and support they can give which took some of the mystery out of such massive networks and turned them instead into useful tools to navigate. I think overall this was the key note of today, it really was so much about empowering us to take on board all of what we could utilise to help us get where we want to go, and recognise what we have already to back us up!
Talking of putting our skills to work, on Friday we went to go and see the first space in which the YAK SHACK will be opening, as part of the Fusion project i Cowley based in an empty shop in the Temple Cowley shoping centre in Oxford. It is not going to be empty any more! We are going to be upstairs for the last three Saturdays in June, and each of us are going to be doing music, visual art, poetry and graffiti based things involving and including young local artists and showing people what we are about! More details to follow, but I am so excited; planning is all well and good and obviously necessary but there is NOTHING like actually getting active, creative and stuck in! ….
Instead of writing something I thought I would do a painting. Fairly random as most of my ideas are!
YAK Shak is certainly heading in the right direction!!
ink and water colours. 21x25cm
Posted in James Loraine-Smith
Tagged art projects, graffiti, YAK Shack, young creative leaders
Last week, James and I got our hands very mucky. Pimp My Bike is a project that OYAP has been running for a few years now and it works. This project has the right kind of wow factor for young people.
James and I were up early for two days in a row to make it up to Bretch Hill Banbury. As far as I know, working with spray-paints and children is not new to James. This type of project is new to me. Engaging with a group of younger people who I don’t know, is also new to me. When I was at school I avoided people my own age because I was bullied so this was a very interesting experience for me in many ways.
It was really amazing to see the turn around in some of the young people’s attitudes. The inspiration and wow factor of seeing their bikes transform through their hard work. Sim (the mechanic), Graham (the artist), James and I all encouraged the young people throughout the project and by the end there was a great sense of pride, respect and team work. When I wasn’t mucking in learning about bike mechanics with the young people I was evaluating the project. This gave me an opportunity to talk to them one on one which they were all happy to do (the exception of one who came for the second day).
I really enjoyed working with James on this. As I was driving us to and from Banbury I had a chance to explore the project with him.
The following day after the Pimp My Bike project was the Pop Choir at Bretch Hill. This time it was Ellie and I. This was fascinating. There were a good few boys who turned up to this after having been involved in Pimp My Bike. They didn’t stay for the whole evening but the fact that they wanted to see what was happening at their community centre (which is very new) was an encouraging sign. One of the volunteers the day before had said that she could tell there was an increased sense of belonging to the community centre and this definitely seemed to echo this.
The pop choir got the mums of Bretch Hill excited. By the end of the first half of the evening they were discussing creating their own community choir. This was lovely to see. There was nothing that I could contribute to this evening in terms of leadership but just being their to see the community engage in a different way to the previous project was good experience.
I feel that both of these experiences have given me an insight to the way community arts projects can help inspire and engage local communities. The community centre at Bretch Hill are working towards providing more and more resource for the local community and it was good to be a part of that in the early stages.
I will blogging about Pimp My Bike in a more in-depth and personal response on my own blog: beccart.wordpress.com
Our first day of training after the HFL filming project – we were a three man band today with me, James and Becca, but by golly we got a lot done! Being in the first stages of thinking about our own projects ( : ) ) we had a look at a recent project and had a bit of a brain storming session about how we might go about organising our own and what our objectives might be for making sure young people that participated got the most out of it. The project itself was a very interesting idea – a short film for the arts council about what art means to young people who are NEET (not in education, employment or training); the conclusion being not very interested to begin with, but only because they hadn’t been given the opprtunity to discover all the things art could actually emcompass (theatre, music, poetry, graffiti, dance etc) and how they could therefore take ownership of it. It really made me think about what I want to do with my project, and how passionate I feel about breaking down the barriers of exclusivity in the arts for young people.
We also had a chat with Catherine Lacey, an amazing person that has done many things and is now Cheif Exec of the Oxfordshire Children’s and Voluntary Youth Services; it was really great to meet someone with that much experience who was impassioned about what we wanted to do! You can’t get a confidence boost much better, really.
Today was the first time I have watched our vlogs from the HFL project; apart from confirming the fact that on camera I look like the moon from the Mighty Boosh, I think they really show how well we are all going to work together, and bring a massive dose of GSOH to whatever we do as well as determination to do something preety damn good. We were also introduced courtesy of Liz to the wonderful world of twitter – and before all anti- twitterites judge, James and I tweeted that we as two young artsits were looking for an exhibition space around Oxford and within half an hour had heard about this amazing sounding exhibition wall at Didcot’s new arts centre The Cornerstone! So literally watch this space…..
Posted in Ellie Tranter
Tagged dance, exhibition, graffiti, music, poetry, theatre, training
Hi,
I’m James, One of the five on the Young Creative Leaders Programme.
I am an artist/ graffiti artist from Oxford.
As I travelled home on Monday from the induction day I couldn’t stop thinking about the opportunities that lie ahead of us. I’m very excited!
I will post more on here soon, here is a link to my personal blog with some of my artwork: www.kleinershames.blogspot.com
