Design for Life: Community Groups
Below you will find a case study outlining a recent Design for Life project at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery involving a young mother’s group. For more ideas on how to use the museum’s collections to inspire design with your group, please follow the Run Your Own Project link to your left.
Case Study
Brighton Museum & Art Gallery worked with a group of young mothers from Eastbourne, none of whom had ever been to the museum before.
Participants were asked to design and print a three-colour screen-printed T-shirt for their young children.
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The group took part in an informal ‘inspiration trail’ around the museum, in which they were asked to pick out colours, patterns and shapes that they thought might appeal to their young children. The young people were encouraged to be very open in their interpretation, and nothing within Brighton Museum & Art Gallery was off-limits to them in terms of source material. The women chose to focus on things as varied as the oil painting Swans at Play by Gaston La Touche (1909) and a West African puppet in our Performance gallery.
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We chose to work with a local screen-print artist for the project. The content of the sessions was devised in collaboration with museum staff yet delivered solely by the designer over the course of two afternoons. The designer also spent some time at a screen-print studio preparing the image layers for print on Photoshop and burning them onto screens.
The project took place over two intensive half-day sessions at the museum that took place three weeks apart.
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The first session revolved around design and preparatory work. After some initial sketching in the galleries, the group used marker pens and tracing paper to work up their drawings into simplistic black and white line drawings in one of our education rooms. As they drew they were expected to think about which parts of their design would make up each layer in the final print.
In the gap between the two sessions our screen-print designer burnt each of the participant’s design layers onto a professional-standard mesh screen so that it was ready to print.
The second session saw the group create colour-by-colour prints of their designs, taking care that each layer was accurately lined up. After practicing this technique with some success on paper, they moved across to printing directly onto the 100% cotton T-shirts we had provided for their final designs.
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Each member of the group was able to take two T-shirts home for their children, as well as contribute one for display. The work of each participant was also displayed as part of the Design for Life exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. At the private view and young people’s conference the young women had a chance to meet the museum’s patron, Erin O’Connor, who talked to them about the designs they had created.
Comments
‘Involvement in the project has introduced our young mums to the many interesting and varied objects that can be found in the museum. They told me they had expected the exhibits to be boring so were ‘well surprised’’ – Group Leader
‘A strength of the project was that it was focused closely on the role of the women as mothers and the bond between mother and child’ – Designer
‘Now I would feel confident going to a museum and enjoying it there’ - Participant
‘I have very much enjoyed this project! Thank you for the experience’ - Participant
‘I enjoyed the project as it got me interacting with other people. It was a very enjoyable experience ‘ - Participant
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Tips for running a project like this
- Screen-printing is quite a complicated process so ensure you have some expert help
- Allow time in between sessions for the designs to be burnt onto screen
- Concentrate on replicating elements of design (e.g. recurring patterns, simplified shapes) rather than the object itself – as this will be too complex
- Be careful not to include too many layers in your final design – this can become expensive and complex to print!
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A simple alternative T-shirt design project
1. Use museum inspirations to create simple, bold and colourful drawings on A4 paper.
2. Photocopy these onto A4 clear acetate transfer sheets, which can be ordered through arts and craft suppliers.
3. These can be then ironed onto blank white t-shirts to create attractive personalised designs.
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