Author:
Dave Wood
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Date Posted: Thu, April 17 2003, 9:33:12
Hiya Wendy,
it's still going strong. There was an interesting article in The Guardian newspaper last year:
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<p>Dave<br />
<a rel=nofollow target=_blank href="http://www.liverpoolpictorial.co.uk">Liverpool Pictorial</a><br />
------------------------------</p>
<p><strong>When art becomes a Fact </strong></p>
<p><strong>Liverpool's Holly Lodge School for Girls is leading the way for digital
arts in schools by collaborating with the city's newest cultural centre, the
Foundation for Art and Creative Technology - or Fact : £25,000 AWARD HOLLY
LODGE SCHOOL FOR GIRLS, LIVERPOOL Digital readings (art and design, ages 11-18)
</strong></p>
<p>Martin Wainwright<br />
Tuesday October 15, 2002<br />
The Guardian</p>
<p>When Jackie Ley and her Liverpool sixth-formers look at a shiny computer purring
through a complex digital art programme, they see something quite different:
a painter's palette slopped with dabs of oil colours and streaks of turpentine.
</p>
<p>"We're learning to use these amazing new ways of making images,"
says the director of art at Holly Lodge girls' comprehensive. "But it's
important to see them as versions of the palette and brush; not miracles but
the latest way of helping us to create the art that's in our heads." </p>
<p>The art in the heads of Holly Lodge pupils - and their counterparts at three
partner comprehensives in Liverpool - is facing a revolution thanks to Ley's
scooping of the first BT and Tate Modern art-in-education award. Holly Lodge
has had plenty of artists and sculptors in residence in the classroom over the
last decade, but Ley decided to turn that idea on its head. </p>
<p>Her £25,000 award is paying for a young staff room colleague, Emma Letheren,
to spend a year as teacher-in-residence at an art gallery; not just any conventional
gallery, but the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology which is about to
open Britain's biggest permanent exhibition of digital art on Merseyside. </p>
<p>Perched among the computers at Fact as her PhotoShop program mixes an audio
and animation piece, Letheren explains the five projects she is due to have
up and running by the end of the year. They start with an IT version of the
typical classroom art cupboard - Art Tools Online, a website she is building
with click-and-use digital equipment for any colleague on Merseyside to operate.
</p>
<p>"Project two will make sure they know how to use them," she says.
"We're setting up masterclasses with artists teaching the teachers."
</p>
<p>Turning back into pupils for a couple of hours, school art staff will learn
skills such as image manipulation - the sort of thing that teenagers will dive
in and have a go at, but which leave a lot of older, computer-nervous teachers
scared. </p>
<p>Then there's a teachers' chatroom (project 3) under construction, where projects
one and two can be discussed and helpful hints exchanged. And so to project
four, which will bring the pupils of Holly Lodge, West Derby, Anfield and St
John Bosco schools into Fact when the gallery opens in January. </p>
<p>"I'll be working with the school students and digital artists from Fact
and on a series of artworks," says Letheren. "They'll be collaborative
projects which then go on to be exhibited as part of the Liverpool Biennale."
</p>
<p>Building up the project, which Holly Lodge hopes to continue beyond the initial
year by finding new sponsorship, was a challenging business, says Ley. For one
thing, a teacher with the necessary up-to- the-minute skills in IT and multimedia
was not easy to find. </p>
<p>Emma Letheren came from an unusual background for someone now happily dealing
with what she calls the "in-your-face kids" of Liverpool. After a
degree in textile design from Derby University, she took a doctorate in research
into passementerie - the recondite art of making decorative interior trimmings
such as tassles, curtain fringes and tiebacks. </p>
<p>"I got very into passementerie and went and worked for a firm in Derby
which specialised in it," she says. But she gradually found life alone
with her computer a little untaxing; she decided she wanted to pass on her skills,
especially the extraordinary power of the IT art programs she was using in industry,
to schools. </p>
<p>Her Fact attachment takes her out of Holly Lodge for two and a half days a
week; for the rest of the time she is back in the classroom where the fifth
strand of the project sees her passing on the lessons she has learned at the
Foundation. </p>
<p>Ley forecasts "endless permutations and possibilities in our pupils' art"
as the link between the gallery and the school, plus the three other comprehensive
partners, matures. </p>
<p>At Fact, administrator Susie Reynolds says that she and her 30 colleagues are
already enjoying small, initial student visits from the schools to the gallery's
temporary base in the Bluecoat Arts Centre behind Liverpool's pierhead. </p>
<p>"It's great having Emma around, too, and there's a lot of interest among
our digital artists in helping her with the online ideas and what IT tools to
put on the website." </p>
<p>Teacher's tip: Jackie Ley says: The most important part of our application
was thinking through the project to make sure it would be challenging and new,
but also achievable. You have to be very thorough in all the planning. It's
also a great plus to collaborate with other institutions, like Fact; we found
that discussions with them created a mix of ideas which we probably wouldn't
have had on our own. </p>
<p><br />
<font size="1">EducationGuardian.co.uk © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002</font></p>
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