An exciting opportunity for an experienced artist has arisen with the Union Chain Bridge (UCB) project.

As part of the UCB public engagement programme, a participatory art project will take place next year (2022) which engages three local schools in a creative workshop to explore stories around the social & political context of the Union Chain Bridge, its engineering, border identities, and local communities. The Union Chain Bridge project seeks a creative practitioner experienced in educational facilitation to lead on the three workshops.

In the workshops, students will explore the themes of border identity and the inspirational engineering of the Union Chain Bridge to identify stories which are important to the pupils themselves. The creative output of each workshop will be the production of artwork telling those selected stories. The resultant work will then be printed and distributed to younger pupils as an educational resource. It is anticipated that the form of the artwork may be zines, art books, graphic novels, comic books or similar, however this is dependent on the artist’s practice or may be determined through input from students.

This project comes after a successful pilot project was tested out in the summer of 2018. In the pilot, students from Berwick Academy teamed up with Applied Comics, Berwick Archives, Newcastle University, Printspot, and Museums Northumberland to produce a comic anthology about cholera in the local area in the 1830s. Pupils explored archive materials and a nearby graveyard to identify cholera stories in Berwick-upon-Tweed. This information was transformed into comic strips with the help of an artist and the comics were then printed.

This new educational project will follow a similar structure. Applications for interested artists are open now. If you would like to learn more about the role, the Creative Brief can be found here. If you have any questions about the commission, please contact Becki Cooper, Learning and Outreach Officer, by email rcooper@museumsnorthumberland.org.uk.