An Art-Line for Margate
Thanet Young Artists Strand
The Margate School had supported the Rotary Club Margate Thanet Young Artists initiative over the lockdown, with over 40 Thanet schools participating. The Margate School is proposed to digitise each art work and make them accessible to the pupils, parents and the wider community. As an indication the physical exhibition has attracted over 20,000 visitors in the past. The task was to support the digitization of the art work, which can become the platform for an archive updated each year. The Margate School was working towards developing a dedicated independent ‘young artist gallery’, with the curatorship and exhibition to help underpin that development work. More generally we were looking to develop a curatorial approach to the project that would help to celebrate young people with artistic interest, work with local schools and the Rotary Club to move this exciting initiative onto a sustainable level.
The Artists
Anna Skutley and Umut Gunduz
Anna and Umut's collective practice brings together language theory, gaming and 3D technologies to explore ideas of assemblage, mapping and the digital archive. In doing so they create a testing-ground for investigating fiction and gameplay as frameworks for physical and virtual curatorial spaces. For all of their projects they look to collaborate with other artists and local community groups.
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Anna and Umut made an RPG video game for the "Postcards from Home" project - in collaboration with Henry Maddicott, James Pagdham and Margate Rotary Club. They received 78 postcards from three different local schools, which have been archived in this playable video game. Navigate the game's different virtual worlds to find the postcards and see the amazing work contributed by Margate's young artists. Play the game here.
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Henry Maddicott
Henry Madd is a poet, event producer and workshop facilitator who has performed across the UK and Internationaly. Two time Kent Slam Champ, Henry uses his practice to find ways of engaging new audiences with various art forms through community outreach projects working with organisations such at The Marlowe, The Philharmonia Orchestra and Boomsatsuma. Henry is also a student on The Margate School's European Fine Art Masters: Art, Society, Nature.
James Padgham
‘Opening a fictional place in a book. James Padghams disruptive narrative and conversation has humoured the nonsense of the broken toy. Pausing for thought he questions the relationship of the object with himself. He has found a static animation for the furniture left by the edge of the road, to find a new home’. James Padgham is a secondary school Art teacher and practising artist. Working between assemblage and collage he is building an imaginary visual story, re-appropriating the nature of the objects he collects under the name of Lostnorfound. A childhood playfulness is inherent in his work, but this is just the surface to a practise that challenges the viewer and asks them to engage in discovering what the suggested narrative offers. The placement of the work and the context that this is viewed offers further questions and often contradictions. The constructions from his play in the studio are situated in the world and then documented forming a tableau vivant, raising questions about the metaphorical edges of the work. James has alluded to these as personal experiences and reflections from his experiences in education.
