Bottisham Village College Banners

Over the year Cary and I work on many different small scale community projects - workshops that take a couple of hours or a single day.  I love these projects because they have the excitement of an instant 'hit'.   You start with a blank sheet and in a very short while you have helped someone produce a banner or a T-shirt....etc.

Often these small scale interventions are part of a bigger project that goes beyond the print  - so it might be a small corner of a  bigger event like the re-opening weekend of the Cambridge Zoology Museum, working in a school as part of a series of activities to build up young people's confidence, or perhaps just generally contributing to an isolated community's access to the arts.

Every now and again, though, a  bigger and more challenging project comes along and that is really exciting.

Cary and I have been working on a banner project at Bottisham Village College which has been both a big project in itself as well as part of an even bigger project and event.  'Project 80' was a celebration of the college's 80th anniversary and it explored the history, heritage and architecture of the school.

We were asked by Lesley Morgan, Arts Development Officer, to create a series of banners with the pupils at the school which could hang one of the fabulous spaces in the new school building.

We chose a corner where the new building connects with the old - a sort of hub where the main entrance leads to the staircase and  turns the corner into the older building.  



Our inspiration was the school's architecture, new and old.  We used photos taken on site as a starting point for prints that were sometimes literal, sometimes more abstract. 

 We also used photos taken by the construction manager at Morgan Sindall showing the construction process. 

And we included a few images from the school's archive, as well as pictures of Henry Morris, the visionary educationalist who founded the school.

Colour inspiration was from  the 1930's when the school was first built. Blacks, greys and spot colours.
 

Forty amazing year 7 pupils worked on this project, wielding craft knives to cut incredibly complex stencils and screen printing these onto the banners themselves.

Cary went up with Ian in the scissor lift (did you know it was called that?) to hang the banners.

And here we have it......

A big thanks to Lesley Morgan,  Arts Development Officer for organising this project and to the site team from the College and from Morgan Sindall who gave up their own time to help with the hanging.  And a special thanks to The Arts Society, Newmarket who funded the project, with additional support from the Patricia Fay Memorial Fund.