Pea Arts About

Unfinished -We made a mixture of a human and a robot with its heart hanging out. We deliberately left it unfinished because humans are never finished. Like any artwork, the preparation for this writing reached a stopping point rather than a state of completion. There has been an emotional exchange where part of me stays with the festival and the festival stays with me, bolted on like found debris and as ephemeral and fleeting as sounds made by personal assemblages teasing handcrafted instruments. These jottings are a collection gleaned from my experiences of bearing witness to the Yorkshire Sculpture International engagement programme, which began before me and continued after me. My intersection with it was partial, incomplete, but full in other wonderful ways. -What do you mean by vessels? -Things that are open and can contain. We are the stories we carry: the receiver that is also a transmitter, handmade expressions of identity and a sense or wish of home,

On Tuesday 2 July 2019 I was at Abbey Grange Church of England Academy  for a sculpture install and workshops as part of the Yorkshire Sculpture International engagement programme. Engagement artist Zara Worth  has been working with Year 9 pupils (ages 13-14) to explore their relationships with social media and screen-based handheld devices in sculptural form. The result was exhibited in the school for a day in dialogue with Eduardo Paolozzi's AG5 (1958) from the Leeds Art Gallery collection. Nigel Walsh, curator of modern and contemporary art at Leeds Art Gallery, spent the day with these works and introduced Paolozzi's to various year groups throughout the day. We learned from Nigel that Paolozzi was a Scottish artist of Italian parentage whose work excelled in post-Second World War London. Nigel explained that the sculpture began as a portrait, and it does maintain a bust-like physique. The original was made by gauging into clay and plaster and sticking on bits of de