The exhibition, entitled Hidden Hearts, launched over Valentine's weekend, featuring artwork centred around heart motifs. For the art trail, clients designed heart-shaped characters based on their hobbies and interests, collectively named the ‘Little Lovies’. These characters were sublimated onto log shapes and hidden throughout Falkland Estate. Those involved fully immersed themselves in the task, creating unique, comical, and whimsical images. For example, Zoe, who loves musicals, based her character on Phantom of the Opera, while Samantha, who enjoys photography and pottery, depicted her character holding a camera with a pot by her side. Samantha also took the lead in photographing the artwork for our publicity materials.
Milly, our employability support worker, produced a Hidden Heart booklet for children, featuring all the Little Lovie characters to accompany the heart trail. Children who found all the Little Lovies and ticked them off in the booklet were awarded a ceramic medal. Over 200 children participated in the heart trail, making it a roaring success. Our clients created over 300 images for the art exhibition, utilising various creative processes learned in the studio, including clay work, cyanotype printing, sublimation printing onto wood, fabric, and metal, collage, shadow box art, sewing, and resin casting.
Participating in a public art exhibition provided a sense of purpose, energy, and team spirit in the studio. It offered clients real work experience, requiring them to work to a design brief, meet deadlines, share ideas, and quality control their work. There was a great sense of achievement and pride when their artwork was finally displayed to the public. Falkland Estate staff reported on the event's popularity and shared the positive feedback they received.
Quote from Karen Brown: "I am so proud of everyone pulling together and tapping into their creativity to produce a beautiful, colourful show and art trail. I was especially proud of how hard everyone worked, sharing ideas and encouraging each other to produce such a stunning collective piece of work. Teamwork, confidence building, and creativity underpin what we do in the Studio, and this exhibition demonstrated all these qualities. By working together and putting our heart into things, we can achieve something great.”
Quote from Calvin (Participant): "It feels good to have art I've made on display. I spent many weeks working on lots of different projects, and it's good to see some of them being viewed by other people." "Making my banner was one of my personal favourite projects as well as being the longest it was satisfying to learn new skills and slowly working piece by piece fixing mistakes and in the end, I really liked the end result. It was nice to see it displayed with other banners.”