Lock-Up Launches Little Architects Program for 2010

The Lock-Up Cultural Centre welcomes back their Little Architects this week with another packed program of art, architecture and design.

Lock-Up Director Gerry Bobsien says the weekly program for school children is a unique opportunity to combine creativity with invention. “The kids involved with this program get enormous satisfaction out of learning design basics and combining this with art and architecture. It is all about exploring the city and the buildings and landscape within it,” she said.

“Our patron, the internationally renowned architect Glenn Murcutt is very passionate about the connection between drawing and design. So we have a strong creative component to the program with excellent tutors skilled in both art and architecture.”

Week 1- Welcome to Little A's 2010
Little A's will use this session to discuss upcoming projects and prepare for the year ahead. They will also do some drawing with a focus on experimenting with marks and observing their surroundings.

Week 2- Exploring colour
This session is all about colour; how we use it, how it relates to design and how it can make us feel. Little A's will be introduced to a range of design concepts relating to colour and will produce an artwork exploring the possibilities of different colour combinations.

Week 3- Feeling the world
This session will explore the idea of using texture to activate spaces and surfaces. Little A's will produce their own cave of textures and will discuss the connection between how things actually feel and how they make us feel.

Week 4- Order vs Chaos
This session will contrast two different starting points for creating a design and will explore concepts of rhythm, pattern and composition. Little A's will begin with a set number of basic design elements which they will piece together to create a work. Little A's will then produce a collage of random elements and use this as the basis for a second work.

Week 5- Fantasy Lands
This session will challenge Little A's to design fantastical buildings in response to a range of strange environments. Little A's will be given photos of different landscapes and will draw/ collage buildings and structures in amongst the environments.

Week 6- Highs and lows
This session is all about the city and how the heights of buildings relate to each other.
Little A's will talk about high rise versus low rise buildings and will then create their own skyscrapers. As a group the little A's will then put together a miniature cityscape.

Week 7- Skin deep
This session is all about the facades of buildings and how surfaces can be activated in different ways. Little A's will talk about different ways architects design the outside of buildings and will then design their own facade. Little A's will be encouraged to think about detail, light and texture.

Week 8- Echoes from the deep
This session is all about sound and acoustics. Little A's will explore the way sound interacts with architecture. They will use various rooms in the lockup to create and record noises and will the put together their own soundscape.

A Brisbane based emerging artist, Woodward will produce a new body of work, There's Movement Inside, during his time at the Lock-up.

Circumventing expectations of object authenticity and historical accuracy upheld within a museum context, Woodward will question the precarious authorial position of the resident artist as quasi historian, archaeologist or anthropologist.

Image: Tim Woodward, Natural Extension, 2009

Paul Howard and David Matthews, installation at Museum of London: ‘Rush Hour’, 2007

Visual Artist, Paul Howard, and Writer, David Matthews, both from London are currently in residence for the next three weeks at the Lock-Up.  Paul and David have collaborated on projects since 2005 but the Rush Hour project, which toured the UK, Sierra Leone and Barbados in 2007, and was extensively reviewed by critics and press, was their most important work to date. Rush Hour was a creative response to the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the British Empire.

In Newcastle to research and develop a new collaborative project, Water Fiction, Paul and David will be exploring the emotive issue of global drought and the commodification of water, as seen through the eyes of a remote Aboriginal community in the Australian outback. 

Paul Howard is an award-winning artist and curator and was born in Brighton in 1967. He trained as a Fine Artist at Camberwell College of Arts in London. The starting point of Paul’s work is social-historical events and the history of art. His research is grounded is visual anthropology and to some extent art and cultural theory. The results are theatrical re-stagings of theory and practice from specific spatial-temporalities.

Paul’s recent digital animation work deliberately manipulates symbols and codes bringing out alternative translations of 'Old Master' paintings and allegoric images. The work inspires multiple readings and the layering techniques of the technologies are used to subvert our vision. His work sits within a tradition of montage and cut up techniques that have existed in British art since the Sixties. Furthermore, the works critique trendy culture and the 'vernacular cosmopolitanism' of our time.

Paul Howard is currently Senior Curator at the Casula Powerhouse in South-West Sydney. The residency provides scope for artist and writer to meet in the same country to foster their collaborative process.

David Matthews is an award-winning writer and journalist. Born in London in 1967 to Guyanese parents, he grew up in the East End (and for a spell in Brooklyn, New York). He has filed news reports and features for a diverse range of publications including, the Observer, Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph, GQ, Esquire, Daily Mail and New Statesman, Morning Star, Big Issue and the Evening Standard.

His debut book, the critically acclaimed Looking for a Fight, was published by Headline in February 2001 and is the gripping story of his journey into the dark heart of professional boxing. For nearly two-and-a-half years, he sacrificed his career, family and almost his sanity to chronicle the life of a professional fighter – by becoming one himself. Looking for a Fight was short-listed for the 2001 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award and was an instant Sunday Times and Independent bestseller. An extract based on his boxing exploits, published in Journalist magazine, won the 2001 TUC Press and PR Journalism award for best feature. His second book, Man Buys Dog–a tragicomic narrative non-fiction on greyhound racing–was published in May 2005, again to critical acclaim. David is now completing his third book, True Blue – a journey into social, cultural and political heart of conservative England (to be pub by Fourth Estate, March 2009).

David’s writing style is a combination of participatory journalism, in which he submerges himself in his subject matter, hardboiled reportage and painfully honest social commentary. His books have been variously described as “richly descriptive” (Time Out), “riveting” (Guardian) and “compelling” (Observer) while features and columns have marked him out as a thought provoking and daringly controversial writer.

Please join us in opening the Little Architects Exhibition:
5:30pm, 18 November 2009
Exhibition Dates: 18 - 22 November 2009

The Little Architects is an ongoing program for primary school students  to explore architecture, the city, sustainability, art, culture and design in a variety of fun and practical ways.

The Lock-up Cultural Centre in partnership with the Australian Architecture Association presents a series of hands-on workshops for creative and inquiring young people.

17 Days from Patrick Jones on Vimeo.

Over 17 days the Artist-as-Family, comprised of Patrick Jones, Meg Ulman and Zephyr Ogden-Jones, collected much rubbish and many friends. As a signing off to their time here at the Lock-up, they produced a short film titled 17 Days. Following the movements of the guerilla waste gleaners, the film beautifully describes the city and the activities undertaken by the family during their residency.

Thank you again, Artist-as-family, for all your contributions to both the Lock-up Cultural Centre and greater Newcastle. We are looking forward to your return.