Gallery II
Drawing The City | Tim Curtis & the Bradford City Park Ambassadors
Richmond Atrium, University of Bradford
1 June - 29 July 2011
Tim Curtis, The Schools Linking Network and Bradford Metropolitan District Council worked together to develop a three year programme with over 400 young people in linking projects at primary and secondary schools to record the development of the city park in Bradford - a £25 million public investment in regeneration by the city council due to be launched this autumn after a year of digging and diversions.
It is fair to say that the city park is a contentious space, with perceptions of it exacerbated by the wider current social, economic and political climate but in this work there is a conscious effort to focus on the positive aspects of the civil engineering project and its potential for Bradford.
For the Atrium show, we are showcasing the collaborative drawings the students have created; amongst them a shared drawing with civic leaders, local dignitaries, civil engineers, architects and designers of an imagined city 'scape, multiple part paintings, line drawings and traced images, collaborative collage and an intergenerational word-art cityscape frieze.
It is fitting that this artwork (a 360 degree urban 'scape of the city centre's neutral, central, shared space) about Centenary Square and the site of the city park, should be exhibited in Richmond Atrium (the University'a neutral, central, shared space). As such, these figurative expressions of a city centre in flux, around the perimeters of the Atrium space, bring the City into the University and the University into the City.
