Western Wilds – an international book arts collaboration by Wirral Metropolitan College BA Fine Art and Brigham Young University, Utah. Twelve students and staff from Wirral Met are embarking on an adventure to make artists’ books responding to the wilderness of Yellowstone Park. This inter-disciplinary project is about our relationship to the ‘wild’ and the personal, historical and cultural values which we place on wilderness sites.
On Saturday the 14th of June I will be embarking on a journey with 12 nervous BA Fine Art students who have acceted the challenge to go into the Wilds of Yellowstone Park to meet and work with fellow Fine Art, Music and Dance students from Brigham Young University.
I have been collaborating with the Fine Art staff at BYU since 2009 and every time we plan a project together we like to incroporate the unexpected, to throw us all into the deep end of creative problem solving.
This time the inter-disciplinary nature of the participants and the wild setting of Yellowstone have thrown up new challenges which will force us to re-examin our respective practices and postitions. The production of artists’ books in response to the themes of the ‘Wild’ will be the main focus of the project, but we also expect to create film, audio and performance works too.
We have been working towards this collaboration since last year and for us at Wirral Met, fundraising has taken up much of our time as we have sought to make the trip affordable to our student group. In February we launched a successful Kickstarter campaign which topped up our funds considerably. This campaign in itself was a huge effort, but a brilliant way for us to generate support and to publicise the project to our local arts community.
It was also a great way to concentrate the goup in a shared activity – one of many to come!
A further challenge has been added to our plans with the update of the a-n site which is happening over the period of our collaboration.
I’ve written two blogs for our previous projects on a-n and have had fantastic exposure and feedback from them so its with much regret that we have set up an alternative blog on this blogger link:
http://westernwildscollaboration2014.blogspot.co.uk/
Our group would be delighted if you’d like to follow our progress here while the a-n site is updated.
