Jungle City Edinburgh 2011

Finally I get to tell you all about this!

A few months ago I was approached by the Elephant Family, with whom, if you recall, I painted a life-size adolescent fibreglass elephant for last summers Elephant Parade in London. This time they had grand plans to turn fringe season Edinburgh into a jungle with many animals rather than just elephants.

As you may know the Elephant Family is a charity devoted to the protection and conservation of the asian elephant in the wild. The London Elephant Parade aimed to raise 2 million pounds to go towards securing corridors of land connecting current elephant habitats. In the end it managed to raise over 4 million pounds, a resounding success and a real boon towards protecting the elephant.

Jungle City Edinburgh recognises that there are many other endangered species that share the elephants habitat and that by protecting the habitat for the elephants they are also protecting it for all the other species that live there. As such, Edinburgh in August and September will abound with over 150 life-size sculptures of Elephants, Rhinoceros Horn-bills, Tigers, Crocodiles and Orang-utans.

Edinburgh will be a Jungle! More information here: http://www.jungle-city.org/index.html

Well I have been asked to paint an Orang-utan and more will be revealed on that later. Meanwhile if you have Flickr, Twitter or Facebook you can now follow his progress. I am posting photos online, 1 maybe 2 a day as he progresses. They are going up on Flickr but I tend to link to them online in other places too.

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/noblueskies/

Twitter: http://twitter.com/noblueskies

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Gemma-Cumming/14653030250

The blank canvas

Bracknell's Giant Postcard

Been really busy over the last few months.

• There is a new secret project getting started right now, a project that I fervently hope will become less secret over the next few days. I am itching to tell everyone!

• The 6 weeks prior to Easter holidays were spent doing some creative partnerships work at Ashmead Combined School in Buckinghamshire. I plan to blog about that soon. It needs a separate post.

• However last weekend I got involved with a community art project in Bracknell Town Centre.

It was a little last minute but so much fun! 

Original constructed image of Bracknell

So the story goes:

In March a friend of mine, fellow intern at South Hill Park and all round fab arty graduate Sophie Williams spent a weekend creating and teaching others to up-cycle clothes. In this case taking old, donated and charity shop clothes and embellishing, cutting up to add to other clothes and generally making the old, dilapidated and unfashionable exciting and cool again.

The project entitled Fashion Fixers aimed to get the youth (14-18) of Bracknell to be creative and think about ways to turn old stuff they no longer like into new stuff. A really great ethos especially in this time of financial crisis. 

Setting up with the Water Clock Fountain in the background

Everything made over that weekend was then exhibited and sold last Saturday in a generously donated empty shop in Bracknell Town Centre. The project was partially made possible due to an initiative called ITVFixers (yes the TV station!) along with a lot of hard work by Sophie and some really generous donations. All the proceeds from the sale of the clothes went to Project 125.

Sophie is part of South Hill Park's young producers board “Missed Out” and there were plenty of others from that group who helped both in the lead up and subsequent clean up as well as on the day.

They even got an article in this weeks Bracknell Forest Standard!

Mayor of Bracknell Forest painting

So where do I come in???

Well I'd seen all the build up to the exhibition, so knew exactly what ITV fixers were talking about when I got an email from them via ReOrsa, the Thames Valley Artists group I am a part of. They wanted to involve the community in a project on the Saturday as well as having the exhibition and were looking for a professional artist (painter) to do something. So I proposed a giant postcard of Bracknell and that's what we did.

Many young helpers

We had lots of support from both “Missed Out” and the people of Bracknell, including Bracknell Forest Mayor Cllr Ian Leake, all helping to paint the image side of the “postcard”. Everyone who painted was asked to write something about Bracknell, generally what they liked about it, which would then be added to the reverse of the “postcard”. 

 

Final painted image

Reverse of giant postcard

More photos on my Flickr page here.