Act It Out; Map Yourself; Scale Up: Scale Down

The Learning Department devised drawing projects to encourage close encounters with three works in the gallery, and commissioned ex-MA drawing students from Norwich University College of the Arts to run them.

Act It Out re-interpreted John Crome’s painting Norwich River, Afternoon as a walk-in stage set; visitors represented themselves or the familiar local landscape on the set, creating a new narrative for Crome’s characters in a rowing boat.

Map Yourself was a response to Tony Cragg’s Britain seen from the North, a horizontal relief map of Britain composed of a variety of carefully arranged plastic objects.

Participants made studies of museum objects that had a particular resonance for them, transforming them into 3-D objects before displaying them – captioned to explain their choice – in a large castle-shaped frame.

Scale Up: Scale Down created a vibrant 200% enlargement of John Sell Cotman’s Boy at Marbles from participants’ individual transcriptions (a colour copy of the painting had been cut into twenty small sections), personalised according to tone, colour and texture.

Barbara Whatmore Charitable Trust Awards

The Barbara Whatmore Charitable Trust aims to increase public appreciation of the arts and music. Their awards recognise educators, artists, teachers and others who use The Big Draw to extend their audience’s perception of drawing and to engage them in innovative activities. They reward organisers whose events relate to their setting, local environment or community, show a clear purpose and good results. Individual drawings may have been used to create a collective artwork, or a public display to celebrate participants’ achievements.