NEON STORIES

Acknowledgement of Country 

Footscray Community Arts Centre acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the land from which this content was created and broadcast, the Woi Wurrung and Boon Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation, and pay our respect to their Elders, past and present. We extend this respect to any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who may be watching. We acknowledge their place in our history as the original story-tellers, their living cultures, and that sovereignty has never been ceded. 

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the indirect Object

Artist Statement

 

Neon Stories is the culmination of a six month collaboration between Footscray Community Arts Centre, Western English Language School Footscray Campus, and the indirect Object. As the second wave of COVID-19 took hold, the need to radically change our process and outcome became clear. Gone were the weekly sessions of group play and tactile exploration, replaced with hour long online classes. 

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We asked ourselves, how do you retain the essence of a fundamentally fluid, exploratory and hands on collaboration while working in isolation? 

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Our approach was to embrace the possibilities this seismic shift in scale and space gave us. We used our online classes to emphasise transformations, just as our online process would be transformed into a real, tangible exhibition. Here around you, the handmade becomes digitised and the digital is made real. 

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An artist led process was replaced with cooperation and mutual support between teachers and artists. The teachers became the creative team in the classroom, and none of this would have been possible without them. Through a week-by-week curriculum of focused creative activities, the students developed 2D and 3D design skills in response to simple questions designed to promote creative thinking, informal communication, and new language acquisition. 

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We began with selecting and sharing our favourite things. We drew and built models of our favourite places. We wrote and performed stories about these places, people, animals, objects and natural landscapes. As the weeks went on, we shifted from the known and figurative to embrace pattern, texture, abstract design and wildly imaginative scenarios. 

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These are our Neon Stories, told through our drawings, models, voices, text, light, sound and yes, even neon.

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Beth McMahon

Creative Director

the indirect Object

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What Neon Stories has meant to Western English Language School… 

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Neon Stories fosters the opportunity for our students and their families of Western English Language School, Footscray campus, to participate in the critical nature of making and displaying art that reflects their own understandings of the world. It hopes to create future connections for these children and their families to the broader art world by the provision of an immediate connection to the local community arts facility, FCAC and through the unique and valuable opportunity for a school to work directly with artists, the indirect Object. 

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After a tumultuous 2020 year, it was with such joy that students were provided with packages and boxes of art materials ready to execute a term of art making, creativity and exploration. Neon Sharpies, blue lights, cardboard tubes with drilled holes, clay, brightly coloured lids, shiny pieces of fabric, boxes of string, unusual objects all ready to thread, draw, build, mould, tie and construct favourite or imaginative places. Teachers supported and watched as their students manipulated these brightly coloured art materials and utilised their own language and their acquiring English language to tell stories about them. 

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A series of ‘How To’ videos and Google Meets with Beth and Mike provided the students with engaging and exciting weekly art workshops that adopted a shared love of art making between the students, teachers and artists. Through these meetings, online 3D building programs and sound design workshops, a kind of ‘Mash Up’ between the digital landscape and these real tactile materials began to unfold. The exhibition of these works brings the objects back into real life and showcases the impressive intuition and insightful collaborative effort of our artists.

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Shannon Slee

Project Coordinator

Western English Language School