Blue Room at the Bluecoat
Blue Room is an arts service for adults with learning disabilities that operates 3 days a week 48 weeks a year at the Bluecoat in partnership with Liverpool City Council. Service Users attend the Blue Room one day a week to create exciting art work, in response to exhibitions at the Bluecoat and neighbouring galleries. The Bluecoat recently reopened in March and the Blue Room has been up and running since April. During the closure a steering group consisting of 5 service users and 4 person centered planners (PCP’s) developed the project with staff from the Bluecoat. This included recruiting 5 professional artists and undergoing training to equip them with the skills to operate as workshop assistants when the Blue Room was in full function. Service Users who attend Liverpool Resource Centres come to the Blue Room one of the three days each week.
Each project brings them into contact with a professional artist, who they work with as a group to develop an art related project in response to the exhibition. The responses have been far reaching and varied ranging from performance art to large scale drawing, from animation to the surreal. We will have an exhibition of work in February 2009, giving us the chance to showcase work made so far and to help raise the profile of such an amazing project.
We are currently up for a DaDaFest Award for best Emerging Community group. To vote for Blue Room, please follow the link http://www.nwdaf.co.uk and vote for one of the most innovative partnerships in the country.
Examples of project work
The pool of 5 artists who work with Blue Room includes people with expertise in performance, ceramics, computers and print amongst other mediums. For each project, spanning approximately 6 – 12 weeks, the groups work with one artist to develop a project, and learn new skills in the process. For some members this is the first time that they have worked with contemporary art in this way.
The group who attend Blue Room on Thursdays have recently created art work as part of the Liverpool Biennial's Inter-view project. They have researched and responded to the work of international artist David Blandy. Blandy takes on the alter-ego of The Barefoot Lone Pilgrim, who goes in the search of soul – whether that is soul music or finding his own soul. His latest work, shown at the Bluecoat as part of the Liverpool Biennial International 08: MADE UP exhibition, sees the Barefoot Lone Pilgrim on a quest to find Mingering Mike, a (possibly mythical) musician, who created naively drawn record sleeves that would then turn up in America’s flea markets. Intrigued by the Barefoot’s obscure pilgrimages, the Blue Room group decided to embark on one of their own, a pilgrimage to David Blandy.
The work that Blue Room has produced has been phenomenal. They began their research by emailing questions to Blandy. This provided a direct source for the group to create work to. You can view the group’s response to Blandy’s answers in the form of a short animation on the Inter-view website www.biennial.com/interview. Building on their research of the artist, combined with their response to the Bluecoat’s summer exhibition New Ends old Beginnings, the group created a visually fantastic large scale collaborative cityscape drawing. They placed Blandy within this cityscape, giving an imagined character an imagined journey through a made-up Liverpool. Following this body of work, the group met and interviewed David Blandy as part of Ways of Seeing held at FACT. Needless to say, Blandy was taken aback by the sheer amount and quality of work that the group had produced.
Inter-view clearly demonstrates the range of artistic practices that Blue Room has the opportunity to explore. It challenges the group’s perceptions of art, giving them direct contact with practicing artists and different mediums. During the summer they created cloned David Blandy masks to help them with their quest to find out who David Blandy really is.
You can view more images on the blog section of the Inter-view website. As the Biennial draws to a close, the group are now taking their research to the final stage; asking themselves the question of who their alter-ego would be. To help them achieve their alter-ego’s persona, they have created t-shirts reflecting their chosen character. Watch this space to see how they develop this further!
Related links
Liverpool Biennial International 08: MADE UP Inter-View
