Island 2000 Trust Blog

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We’ve teamed up with Biffa and IW Festival and asked artists to decorate 10 bins that will be used as part of the festival this coming weekend. You can see eight of them here, we’ll post pictures of the ninth one, done by Michael Forrest, when we’ve delivered it to the site. The tenth one is the lovely Bee Bin that Aaron Fletcher did which will actually be used as donation bin over the weekend in the Gift to Nature tent. We don’t know where they’ll end up but hopefully they’ll help festival organisers in their efforts to make the festival a more green and litter free place. Dave Badman enlisted help from students at Chale Primary school to do his large bin. After an educational lesson all about waste, recycling and what to do with your rubbish the children designed their own cartoon story based on imaginary festival goer ‘Rocky’, as he says, “Don’t be a litterbug”!

Multi sensory artwork hits East Cowes

Have you seen the painted Alphabet on Castle Street, East Cowes as part of Island 2000 Trust’s No Barriers project? Not only is this a colourful visual treat, passers by can now get their ears tickled too. Artists Aaron Fletcher and Nathan Holt, who painted the alphabet and all the alliterative words to go along with it, are also part of Ventnor based ‘Blank Beats’. They created their very own ‘Alpharap’ rapping the words that are part of the alphabet they’ve created.

Island 2000 have set up a system whereby you can now call free phone 0800 959 6400 and listen to the ‘Alpharap’ down the phone and on the move.

The Island 2000 Arts team said, “We love the idea of this artwork and we don’t think there’s anything else like this on the Island. It’s a temporary multi-sensory public artwork, but more excitingly, it’s street karaoke!”

The track is available to listen to until the end of August 2008. To listen to more Blank Beat tracks log onto: www.myspace.com/blankbeats

Island 2000 were asked to help out in a number of ways with the big green picnic. One of our tasks was to get people to the site, and so it was time to implement Dan’s printing-press-bike once more….. See the video below or click here to view, comment and rate the video on the Youtube site.

Well, it is now upon us.   The Big Green Picnic kicks off in about two and a half hours.   Island 2000 have been busy preparing all kinds of stuff, from lollipop signs to entrance way arches.  Gift to Nature will be there throughout the day, with an opportunity to see video clips of our work and have a chat with staff about our Friends scheme and the projects it helps bring to life.  Magpie has turned some rubbish into incredible creations which will be on show around the Biffa waste displays.  There will also be some interesting on-street signage, but more of that after the event….   I’m not going to post any images of the amazing creations that will be there, as you should come and see them for yourself.  County Hall  Car Park, Newport from 10-6 Saturday and Sunday.  Oh and there’s lots more interesting stuff from other people too!

We now have a lovely new logo for our Magpie project created by Ventnor based illustrator Nicola Winsland.

Magpie is all about reusing and recycling scrap or unwanted materials in a creative way. This can be for a whole range of purposes and often results in a bit of ‘upcycling’ (which is a rather clunky term meaning making things better than they were in the first place!).

Most recently we have been asked to create some signs for the Council’s Big Green Picnic this weekend. Fortunately we have some expert Magpie scroungers on our I2k staff and we’ve managed to get a hold of some old lollipop sticks that aren’t used for school crossings any more and we’ve made them into handy signs that will be used to help direct people to the site.

Look out for Dan’s giant ‘Welcome’ arches on the day too.

We’ve also been working with the IW Festival and Biffa to get artists to decorate some large bins that will be used during the festival. One of them will actually be a giant collection box for bee conservation work so we thought who better do design it than artist and actual Bee (albeit the musician kind) Aaron Fletcher.

Last but not least, The ‘Dolly Mixtures’ exhibition is now up in the Learning Curve Gallery at Quay Arts. The exhibition has been brought together in partnership with St Georges school to help raise awareness and funds for their Dragon project (www.stgeorgesdragon.com) which is a unique project to help increase opportunities for pupils at the school. Catalogues are on sale from Quay Arts or Island 2000 (hannah@island2000.org.uk or 298098 ext 102) for £5 and they include a raffle ticket for a draw on Thurs 29th May where all of the dolls in the exhibition will be raffled off. There’s some real gems in there so make sure you buy your ticket in time.

As part of our work for Yarmouth Harbour on all things Yarmouth Pier, we were asked to put together a show to celebrate the pier and mark its re-opening. The Not-The-End-Of-The-Pier Show was born. A certain member of staff who shall remain nameless decided it would be a good idea to claim we could light up the pier as part of the show. We calculated we had around £1,000 to illuminate the 609ft long pier. A quick bit of online research turned up various projects to light piers. Saltburn Pier had been lit, but permanently. Cost? £380,000. hmm… New Brighton Pier came in for a more modest $50,000NZ. Nowhere I looked had a budget of less than £25K, even for temporary installations. Oh dear. The Island 2000 team kicked around various ideas, including illuminated balloons, which would have looked beautiful but gave us too many issues of reliability, safety and marine environmental risk. Out of this however was developed a simple, low cost idea.  Post event we had enquiries from people wanting to replicate the idea, and I thought it might prove helpful to others looking to light large structures to blog details on how we did it.

We bought tiny LED packages designed to insert into balloons from Ebay and threaded them together with garden wire in groups of 3. Each group of 3 was then strapped to the enormous handrail with 4 long cable ties linked together at 4ft intervals (or 4 plank widths - it was the easiest way to measure, even if you look rather silly tiptoeing down the pier counting!). The local community helped light the pier, collecting a set of lights each from the bottom of the pier, then strapping them on where we had put out the cable ties. It was still light when we started, and we hadn’t tested the concept on the pier (only testing had been strapping LEDs on the back of my car one rainy night and running halfway down the street to check they were visible) so it was a nerve racking half hour as the sun set. As it got darker though it became clear that the effect was working. Once the lights were in place we deployed the last stage of our lighting, floodlighting the timber roundhouse at the end of the pier. We used a Ring PowerPack - a handy combination of heavy duty battery and inverter in one box, providing 300W of mains power to supply power to 4 low energy site lamps from screwfix.

The approximate cost breakdown was:

600 LEDs - £300
4 work lamps £160
Powerpack £100
Garden wire £3
Cable ties £50
Experimentation along the way £200

The end result was captured beautifully by Julian Winslow. Because of the angle of the shot (aimed at capturing the fireworks - not included in the budget!) you can’t see the lights close in to shore that well, but the ones at the end 600+ft away can be clearly seen.  Click on the picture for a larger version.

I had the great privilege of joining in with Professor Boffin’s walking festival walk around Cowes and East Cowes “The Queen’s Bloomers” on Sunday. What a great walk! If he manages the trip across the Solent to present it again next year I would heartily recommend it. The YouTube video below gives a small taste of the days fun.

Saturday saw the re-opening of Yarmouth Pier after months of work replacing piles and improving the look of the pier. Alan Titchmarsh officially opened the pier, and unveiled a plaque listing donors to the pier appeal. Meanwhile Island 2000 provided all manor of excitement in Pier Square and at the end of the pier, including arts and craft activities, a Gribble hunt, pier wildlife safari and a display of the New Pier Archive including an audio-visual presentation. In the evening an estimated 500+ people returned to light the pier and enjoy a fantastic fireworks display.

Some pictures below courtesy of Cat James

No Ian, Alan Titchmarsh is opening the pier, get down!

The second sexiest man on TV charms the crowds by discussing piles before opening the pier.

and then unveils a plaque, assisted by Richard Gribble, who is very proud of his curtains. A member of Island 2000’s crack security detail hovers to the right, hiding behind a silly grin…

…while another guards the image of Roger Herbert. Don’t let the smile fool you, this man is SAS trained you know.

Island 2000 have teamed up with staff at St Georges school to present Dolly Mixtures.

Dolly Mixtures is an eclectic mish-mash of art dolls created from an equally eclectic range of materials by more than 20 Island-based artists exhibited in the Learning Curve Gallery at Quay Arts from 17th May in support of the St George’s School DRAGON Project.

Visitors to the exhibition will have the rare opportunity to own these pieces of art and to support a good cause at the same time as they will be raffled off to raise funds for the project.

Catalogues will be on sale at the Quay for £5 which will include a raffle ticket on which you can indicate your favourite ‘dolly mixture’ doll. The draw takes place on Thursday 29th May (between 6-8pm), so do go along to buy your ticket and see the draw. If you can’t get to the Quay to buy a catalogue e-mail hannah@island2000.org.uk for info on other outlets.

The DRAGON project at St George’s is an amazing and ambitious new kind of learning centre run by students for students. It will offer new opportunities for pupils at St Georges School as well as pupils across the Island who can come and use the unique bespoke facilities.

Check out the official website to read more about the project

image courtesy of Judes Crow