BA Newsletter PDF BA Newsletter March 2017 | Page 10

Page 10 of 12 Secondary News
March 2017
Living Communities Project
In December 2016 The Art Department at Breadalbane Academy secured funding to explore a
community Project with our Feeder Primary Pupils as well as our Secondary pupils on the campus.
We were charged with the task of exploring pupils’ sense of identity and heritage and we realised that
this was heavily informed by the wonderful landscape from which they come. Over several months the
Art Department staff travelled from Kinloch Rannoch to Grandtully, from Dunkeld to Kenmore and
beyond.
In each school we visited pupils were asked to explore their sense of heritage and what makes their
area so special to them. In both Primary and Secondary, pupils constructed paper structures that were
personal to them and their experiences in the community. They created these structures from
photographs, drawings and pieces of writing expressing their personal memories of the area and their
experiences of the local heritage. These paper structures were then placed together to mimic the
aerial street views and townscapes of the area. The paper strips were turned inwards to represent the
individual’s experiences, but placed together within the context of the experiences of their peers, these
structures were then used to physically build the aerial footprint of the community they came from.
Within the completed Artworks, each community is linked by the common experience of the waterways
meeting at the River Tay. We explored this with Secondary pupils through glass fusing workshops
using recycled glass from the local distilleries and experimenting with the different characteristics of
the waterways in different locations. Whether loud and prominent or more as a background note, these
waterways underpin all our communities in Highland Perthshire. The pupils reflected this in the glass
they chose to represent the waterways in different locations.
This project has been a huge success and has been exhibited within the Community Campus for all to
see. The Secondary pupils and Art Department have also had the opportunity to share the good
practice and the work that has been completed via a live online video stream to promote the living
communities projects and support Perth’s Bid for City of Culture 2021.