Tramway to hold children's exhibition

The Children’s Exhibition, which opens on Saturday, July 7, will feature work created by artists Richy Carey, James McLardy and Melissa Stabile, and designers Oliver Pitt and Anne Seseke.

The exhibition is presented as part of Festival 2018, the dynamic cultural programme for the Glasgow 2018 European Championships.

For the Children’s Exhibition each artist and designer has explored different themes through a wide variety of media from sculpture and sound, to watercolour and video, to make works that engage with children and the way they interact with the world around them.

Glasgow based artist James McLardy’s pavilion sculpture emerges from the simple joys of rhinotillexis, the act of picking your nose, creating a series of pickable, malleable and reconstructible sculptures from plasticine (SculpaClay).

The works are reminiscent of bronze modernist sculptures before they slip into a messy playful entropy, exposing bones, nasal cavities and grids; a stage for children’s own sculptural play.

Sao Paulo based artist Melissa Stabile has created a new series of her ongoing work Confortáveis or Comfortables, absurdly shaped wearable pillows that incorporate a psychedelic whirl off vibrant colours and textures, including fake hair extensions, sequins, rubber, latex and fleece. Stabile sees these works as a way to engage people of all ages in sensorial imaginative experience, arguing that people should ‘touch and feel’ more in a world dominated by the visual digital age.

Artist and composer Richy Carey’s work looks at how sounds meet images. The TWIST (is that you’re just like me) explores what the sound of liquid crystals, a material found in LCD screens, mood rings, the walls of our cells, and bubbles amongst many other things, might be.

Through a series of workshops with a group of P2 school children at Glendale Primary School, Richy and the kids visualised, verbalised, sonified and embodied the in-between-states behaviours of Liquid Crystals to create an interactive sound and video installation.

For his commission Glasgow based designer and musician Oliver Pitt, began by researching his own Steiner School education to create a wall print from a series of ‘wet on wet’ paintings, a method of working with watercolour on wet paper, used at Steiner Schools to encourage young children to think about colour and form in an abstract way. Pitts wet on wet paintings have been blown up to industrial scale, forming a backdrop and platform for the exhibition.

Graphic artist Anne Seseke has also returned to her education to draw influence for her work, a moveable typeset etched onto colourful Perspex that evolved from the standardised method of teaching French school children to write uniformly.

Ultimately refined and abstracted from this original influence the work creates a language free form structure or order, making letters into playful abstract shapes, stand-ins for sounds, exclamations, and images.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of events with various different opportunities to access and engage in the exhibition space, and find out more about ideas around the making of contemporary art.

Councillor David McDonald, chair of Glasgow Life and ceputy ceader of Glasgow City Council, said: “The Children’s Exhibition at Tramway is a fantastic way for young people to learn more about contemporary visual art. The exhibition invites visitors to roll around on the floor, hear unusual sounds, discover new and amazing sights, and much more.

“Tramway is a very popular venue for children and their families, with our exhibitions, classes, workshops and shows, and we hope the Children’s Exhibition will encourage everyone who experiences it to keep exploring and enjoying contemporary visual art.”

Find out more at: tramway.org