Arts & Heritage Blue Sky Museums project

Blue Sky Museums is an Arts & Heritage project established in 2020 during the Covid-19 crisis, which invited artists to create unusual and ambitious project responses for some of the Meeting Point museums that A&H has worked with since 2016. The project was an opportunity for artists to engage in untethered idea development without restrictions of practical delivery or limitation of a budget.

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I have chosen The Brontë Parsonage Museum. I am interested in the internal world the Brontës  explored through their writing. I am particularly interested in the character of Jane Eyre who finds her voice throughout Charlotte Brontës novel asserting her beliefs and holding her own truths to her superiors despite being in a place and time that subjugated women and children through religion.

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My artwork starts by producing original watercolour illustrations and sketches which would then translated to ceramics in traditional blue and white. The plates connect with the functional everyday items that the Brontës would have used whilst focusing visually on aspects of the novels and aspects of the women themselves illustrating images such as a bird cage and birds taking flight "I am no bird ; no net ensnares me ; I am a human being with  an independent will." Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre. The plates would be attached to a dry stone Yorkshire Barn or building wall, connecting the artwork with the landscape. The plates would range from smaller images contained on one plate to larger images covering several plates to be viewed from a distance. The plates connect with an everyday functional world but also speak to the inner and creative world within in illustrating the Brontës themes and life within the Parsonage.

 

Initial sketches and videos of watercolour artwork which would be taken onto ceramics to provide a wall installation onto a Yorkshire dry stone wall or similar.

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Work in progress.

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