IN 2009 I took a group of 10 students to BYU Utah to take part in a project called Mapping the West. It was a fantastic experience for us all. We worked along side 35 other students and staff and produced some interesting and thoughtful printed artists’ books.
And now we are doing it all over again in the damp English spring weather instead of the dry Utah desert.
I spent today getting all the college’s final arrangements in place and working with my first year group to set up a public project wall in the main corridor space on our 12 Quays campus. The project wall is intended to be a comminiation device for everyone on the project to add to and to allow every in the college not taking part to see what we are up to.
These fisrt year helping me are part of a group of 20 students and staff who will be working on the Shared Ground project from WMC. We have been making preparations for the project for some time now and are in a heightened state of anticipation and, most probably, anxiety too.
We are hosting a group off 22 BYU arts students and two professors, Joe Ostraff and Sunny Taylor from their BAFA programme.
Tomorrow we will meet them all and host an introductory event to bring all the participants together, get them thinking about the project themes and generally break the ice.
My job is to keep the project focused and moving forward with all the learning activities we have arranged. I’ve got a team of colleagues who have been fantastic in supporting me through the preparation period. Everyone in college has been informed of what we are about to do so it will be interesting to see what feedback we get from those outside looking in at us from other courses and departments.
I’ll explain more about the project brief in later posts.
