Terra Firma Stories

Terra Firma Stories’ is a collaboration between Black Arts Forum, The Lapworth Museum of Geology, King Edward VI High School for Girls and Birmingham Home Educating Families. Working together the participants explored the Lapworth collections and respond by producing artworks that are an interpretation and intervention to parts of that collection.

Through co-design activities facilitated by visual artists Pauline Bailey, Ola Brown and Joyce Treasure, there was a multitude of mixed media A4 works strategically placed within the museum cabinets plus 3 main artworks by the visual artists installed in the main gallery space.  The co-design produced by the high school girls and Joyce are displayed by hanging seven silk like banners floating from the main girders in the museum.

This project was generously supported by the Birmingham City Council’s ‘Creative City Fund’ as part of the Birmingham Festival 2022 cultural programme for the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham.

Joyce Treasure

In response to The Commonwealth Games, the Students from King Edward VI Girls School created characters using a method that was part of their existing curriculum: ‘Exquisite Corpse’, or ‘Cadavre Exquis’. The process assembles images using varied compositions that make up a whole. Principal theorist of Surrealism, André Breton, reported that it started as fun but became a playful and enriching method. 

The girls were encouraged to consider their sketches created during their trip to the museum and how the geographical materiality could be a segue to broader elements regarding their identity and relationship to the Commonwealth. Each section of each piece responds to different ideas of belonging that have been used for the final installation.

I worked with girls from different years over 2 - 3 sessions, from year 12 to lower-sixth form, working with figurative form ranging from mythological creatures, notions of animism and cultural identity.

@joycetreasure.      

Ola Brown

Ola collaborated with children from a home education group, alongside artist (and home education facilitator) Eleanor Hoad to produce work for the exhibition.

The children explored the Lapworth's vast collections, responding to the various items on display by capturing and developing their ideas in sketchbooks. These ideas were then used to inform a final piece of mixed media artwork created by the children. They used many different materials, processes, and techniques, determined by their own artistic vision. Ola Brown then used the children's artwork as inspiration for the two pieces she has created.

@olab2.                

Pauline Bailey

In this partnership project between Black Arts Forum and the Lapworth Museum, Pauline as lead artist and project co-ordinator produced a hanging that was inspired by some of Charles Lapworth’s research and detailed drawings he produced of rock formations and fossils.  Pauline designed and produced this piece by using image manipulation software to design an abstract image that became a sublimation print on canvas.

  @paulinebaileyarts  and  @blackartsforum   www.blackartsforum.co.uk