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Reclaimed by the Thames

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We're delighted to announce the Mayor’s Thames Festival’s Pan London Education project for 2011 - an imaginative and ambitious arts education, sculptural and sound installation entitled Reclaimed by the Thames.

The project wass conceived by artists Becci Kenning and Zach Walker, together with designer-maker Ian Pilditch, all of whom have extensive experience of working in schools and creating large-scale sculptural projects for major events and festivals.

Artists (Becci Kenning, Zach Walker and Ellen Brown) worked with primary schools in every London borough, and Reclaimed by the Thames will bring together the work of 3,000 children from across the capital. You can see a time-lapse video of the structure being built on this website.

Made from reclaimed timber, the life-size skeletal wreck of a ship will be built to look as if the earth has swallowed part of her hull. At 25m long and 3.5m tall, the shipwreck structure will be the centrepiece for our river and environmental zone on Potters Fields Park, next to City Hall, with Tower Bridge and the Tower of London as a backdrop.

Over the summer term each school will take part in a half-day workshop with an artist to create a collage experimenting with the media of photography, drawing and painting, inspired by texture and colour from along the River Thames. Each collage will be printed, frame-stretched and then riveted onto the ship’s timber skeleton. In addition to the artwork, schools will be encouraged to write poems which will be recorded and played as audio within the sculpture, creating whispers from the ship’s past.

The project has been conceived with professional educators as a stimulus for learning across the following departments: Art, Geography, History, Maths, Music, PSHE and Science.

Over the festival weekend we will be running a public programme, encouraging participants to take photos using smart/mobile phone pictures of the textures seen in and around the River Thames and then texting them to a number (tbc), in order to create a large bank of images to be fed through a laptop and projected onto blank sections of material on the ship's shell. There will also be the opportunity to re-create these textures using drawing and painting in on-site public workshops.

You can download various helpsheets for the Workshops by clicking the links below:

Downloads

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