Grundy's annual Schools Exhibition provides an opportunity for schoolchildren from Blackpool and Fylde Coast schools to work with a contemporary artist to produce their own work. Artworks are then displayed as part of the Grundy's ongoing exhibition and events programme.
Previous exhibitions have seen schoolchildren working with drawing, painting, animation, and new media. This year, the schoolchildren have worked with contemporary artist Fiona Grady to explore techniques related to sculpture and installation.
In December 2022, 60+ schoolchildren from St. John Vianney Primary School, Devonshire Primary Academy and Mereside Primary Academy visited the Grundy to have a tour of the Winter 2022 exhibition programme that focused on 'light'. As part of this, the children experienced Fiona Grady's exhibition, Illuminated from Within, which can still be seen outside the Grundy as part of the Grundy's Forecourt Commission Programme. In follow up workshops the children met the artist and heard her talk about how her work explores shape, colour, light and movement in relation to the space in which it is presented. The children were then invited to creatively respond to what they had heard and experienced by making their own artworks. Using coloured and mirrored self-adhesive vinyl and circular and square shaped acrylic panels, the children explored colour, composition and collage as well as experimenting with effects of light and movement.
Installed together here in this gallery, these 60+ artworks generate a cascade of colourful moving shadows, showing how magical effects can be created from the simplest of materials and techniques.
One of the participating children inspired the title for this year's schools exhibition by describing the experience of seeing Fiona Grady's exhibition, Illuminated from Within, as like being, "inside a rainbow".
