Fiona Grady has created a collaborative artwork with the students of London City for Girls School at the Barbican, London in celebration of the King's Coronation. The vinyl window installation spans the windows of the school hall overlooking the Barbican Arts Centre and surrounding Estate.
At the start of the year Fiona met with the Head of Art Helen Corbett and her team to outline the collaboration between herself and the students. The brief for the artwork was to create an installation that allowed each of the students to create an individual component of a larger image. Fiona designed a structured layout to create a cohesive finish using multiple shapes to form the installation's bunting shape. The resulting window installation consists of 160 collaged vinyl shapes, created by pairs of artists from years 7-10. Each of the shapes is unique using a limited colour palette with yellow and orange base colours and red, green and gold details.
CLSG is situated in the heart of the Barbican Estate. The main hall windows which will feature the artwork overlook the lake, surrounding residential flats and arts centre. As a site-responsive artist Fiona's artworks are always designed to connect with the architecture, character and history of their settings. The Barbican is such an iconic site of modernist architecture and design it felt important to reference its forms within the artwork. She looked at birds-eye photos of the estate as well as exploring the area to reach the idea of using rectangles, squares, semi-circle arcs, arches, circles and triangles in a logical grid format. We love how the students have embraced Fiona's project and created such imaginative responses to the brief!