Island 2000 Trust Blog

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

The wonderful mosaic on the wall of the East Cowes Floating Bridge waiting room has finally received the recognition it deserves. For months people have admired this mysterious work and wondered who had created it and how it came into being. Now a plaque produced on Ryde High School’s high-tech laser-cutting equipment has been fixed up beside it explaining all.

The artwork has been dedicated to Lizzie King, one of the young artists who helped make it and who has sadly died.

As part of Sandown Primary’s grounds development project Dan was commissioned to make a lovely wooden xylophone fence. The children love it and it’s a special musical addition to the rest of the creative outdoor classroom at the school.

Hmmm… but how would one transport a 3m wooden xylophone from our offices in East Cowes to Sandown I hear you ask…..?

At night, by bicycle of course.

A quick update on IoW poets and the way they’re putting their words to some down-to-earth uses:

A few weeks ago Clea Barton of Oakfield, Ryde told us how she had got sick of encountering all the dog’s mess around the Oakfield Arc play area, so she wrote a poem about it and nailed it up on one of the fence posts along the fence. Her direct action seemed to have a real effect and a few days later the path was nearly clear.

We thought it would be interesting to test more scientifically Clea’s hypothesis that poetry can have an impact on dog poo, or at least the dogs owners’ willingness to clear it up, so we commissioned her to pick another fouled path in her area and monitor the effect over 12 days of putting up anti-poo poems (poo-ems as Clea calls them).

Below are the results - I think they’re quite remarkable.

As the perennial issue of fouled footpaths seems to dog almost every local council meeting, Clea’s research might be worth serious consideration where other measures have failed. More broadly, it’s interesting to note that poetry can be a good way of communicating even very mundane messages which people otherwise ignore.

Why would this be?

..as Paul Simon once sang, or was it Art Garfunkel on that one…?

After sustained vandalism of the interpretation panel that accompanies the INTERTIDAL sculpture we’ve had to cover it up I’m afraid. It’s sad and annoying that we have to do this and means that there is no information down there about the types of fish in the sculpture or how it came about. Here is a copy of the panel though which,

I guess, is better than nothing.

Artists and friends of the ‘Gift to Nature’ scheme will be at Dimbola Lodge Museum at 11am on Sat 8^th March to view a new range of unique and specially commissioned donation boxes for the scheme.

The wooden donation boxes were made by Vestas as part of an ‘Arts & Business’ supported project. These blank boxes were then given to six commissioned artists for them to redesign, decorate and transform into beautiful boxes that would encourage people to donate money to Gift to Nature.

Anne Bodemeaid, Michael Forrest, Gemma Bell, Miranda Amapola, Jeff Dyson and Chris Jenkins have collectively produced a great array of inventive and novel designs. Such was the appeal of the design challenge that a number of other boxes will be on display that have been designed by friends and staff members of Island 2000 Trust too.

The boxes will be on display in the tearoom at Dimbola Lodge for a further week if you would like to go and see them for yourselves. To find out more about the Gift to Nature scheme and how to become a ‘friend’ please visit www.gifttonature.org.uk . After the display the boxes will be put to use and find their way into Island businesses and Tourist Information Centres

My overdue attempts to make a listening post for the Troll Trail led me to try something new today - blacksmithing. That’s a bit of a grand word for it; all I needed to do was to open out the jagged end of a scaffolding pipe a bit, but it was still a rewarding feeling when the metal squashed out into something more ear-friendly.
My Dad’s wood-burning stove, made from an old Calor Gas bottle, was perfect for heating up the metal until it was red-hot. Then I hit it with the round end of a ball pein hammer while my dad held the glowing pipe and tried to avoid the sparks.

Here it is …a triumph of modern engineering!

East Cowes Primary students braved the cold January weather to make their contribution to the East Cowes Alphabet on Castle Street under the artistic guidance of artists Nathan Holt and Aaron Fletcher. Reception and Year 1 children got stuck in with paint, sponges and stencils to add to the Alphabet. A is for Apple, H is for Helicopter, S is for Spectacles, Sunglasses and Shades and Z, well Z is for Zombies of course.

The alphabet is part of the ‘No Barriers’ project for East Cowes supported by SEEDA. Look out for more additions to the alphabet and more art on the hoardings in the coming months.

Hello everyone - just a reminder that you can so loads more of our stuff (well quite a lot more - we’re gradually bumping it up) by visiting our Flickr sites for arts, Gift to Nature and conservation:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/island2000conservation/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/island2000arts/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gifttonature

Art Commission Brief

The Island Storytellers are a group of people committed to the oral retelling of stories and poems, whether they be traditional or modern tales. They are organising a storytelling festival, ‘Ferry Tales’, in May 2008. One of the elements of the festival will be a storytelling competition at which storytellers tell stories inspired by a piece of artwork. The Arts Team are working with the group to commission a piece of art for this competition which can be used as a prompt by storytellers.

Submissions are invited by 31st January 2008

www.islandstorytellers.co.uk

www.thatsanotherstory.co.uk