How we see objects March 10, 2009

St Peter’s RC High School students came to the museum and chose objects to draw without looking at the labels, then they drew broken objects, and finally they tried to make sense of a bunch of items from the ethonography collections.  What was artist Paul Needham thinking when he asked them to do this?!  And what did the students get out of it?

The idea behind all this was that Paul thinks there’s more than one way to look at an object, from making a lassoo carved from wood to an ‘impossible’ elastic band formed around a fixed rail.

St Peter’s threw themselves into the challenge of deciphering the museum objects, coming up with a whole host of ideas for their possible uses and histories as well as agreeing with some of the labels given to them by the museum!

Highlights: year one August 6, 2008

In our first year we worked with two fantastic artists, Amy Leach and Brian Percival, who had very different practices and opened our eyes to the vast array of possibilities that open up when you work with contemporary artists and schools in a museum. Amy took a class from Chorlton High School on a dramatic journey through time, acting out what they thought Egyptians might say as they look back from the afterlife and then creating memory boxes to tell future generations what they wanted to be remembered about them. It was touching to listen to one young man considerately reflecting on how he had made a good Egyptian husband.

A class from St Ambrose Barlow High School joined Brian in an investigation of native and non-native species in and around the local area and stretching out across Britain. Through photography and film, collecting, drawing, audio recording, interviews, web research and media research, this class created a striking documentary exhibition which demonstrated the diversity of the wild (and not so wild) life that they came across.