Havant Borough Council commissioned Janet Curley Cannon to provide workshops and to create a fabric backdrop for use by the Leigh Park Community Centre youth group.
Havant Borough Council commissioned Janet Curley Cannon to provide workshops and to create a fabric backdrop for use by the Leigh Park Community Centre youth group.
Janet Curley Cannon's story
I was contacted directly by Havant Borough Council who came across me through Axis. The Arts Development officer used the search criteria to source a regional artist using digital media who also had experience working with youth groups. I was asked to meet and discuss an arts workshop and public art commission relating to an urban regeneration project. We agreed terms and I was soon working on a project that directly tied into my own practice within just a few months of joining Axis!
|  | | In January 2006 I met up with a small group of youths and the team leader from the Leigh Park Community Centre 10 to 13 Youth Group for a photo expedition. Everyone was given a digital camera equipped with a zoom lens and instructions for image gathering. I asked them to look for patterns, repeated lines or structures, and surfaces or designs that they saw repeated from one place to another. I also asked them to use the zoom lens to focus in on the specific pattern and not to get too much of the surrounding area. Isolating the pattern or structure, taking it out of context and made it less immediately recognisable. |
Over the next few weeks I took these images into the Youth Club at the centre and worked with an expanded group to learn how to use software on the computers to crop, manipulate, and create new images from the source photos. The original source images as well as many manipulated digital images were collaged together to form a pattern based on the brick work in the Parade area and printed as large banners.
| The banners have made a huge difference to the Activity Hall in the Community Centre and have created a lot of interest. The general feed back from the young people attending the youth club and the adults in the neighborhood forum were very good. All agreed they make the hall look vibrant and are a big improvement on the space. Most people found it interesting to try and work out what the images were of, and from where in the community they were taken. With some still a mystery, it will keep minds busy for a very long time. | |  |
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