The Finished Exhibition!

After sweeping the floor, touching up the paint, and straightening up the fabric displays one last time, on Saturday the 31st of March we opened the doors of Gallery 20 to the general public.  I, and everyone involved with the installation, found it hard to believe that well over a years worth of work was coming to a close.  The vast grey and white space of  Gallery 20 that had once looked like this:

now took on the form of something altogether more bright, exciting, and colourful!

I have loved every minute of this project and to say that it's been a learning curve is a bit of an understatement.  It's not only benefited my University studies, but it's also broadened my understanding of West-African culture and has forced me to question whether sending second-hand clothing to Africa does more harm than good.  For example, are the many highly-skilled domestic industries associated with traditional West African cloth under threat from the many tonnes of discarded clothing items shipped to Africa from Europe, the Far East and America?

Aside from asking myself questions and rethinking my opinions on certain debates and issues, I've also learnt how to 'pack' a mannequin, how to colour scheme fabric groups, and gained an insight in to how to successfully organise and curate an exhibition.  Most of all though, I've been able to volunteer and work in an art gallery - something I didn't think I'd be able to do since choosing GCSE ICT over Art way back in year 9.  Don't hold yourselves back guys!

Install Week in Gallery 20

This week marks not only the start of a large amount of final second year university work (well over 10,000 words worth to be completed over the next four weeks), but it also marks the start of the Style Africa installation!

To keep you up to date with progress here are a few pictures of how we've been getting on, with only one day of install left before the doors open on Saturday!

A view of the hanging fabrics from the back of the gallery space.

Measuring fabric bundles selected to compliment each other on a wall display. 

The view from the entrance of the exhibition, on the end of installation day 4.

The almost-completed wall section about Yoruba dyeing processes.

Fabric Workshop at the Museums Collection Centre

This week's meeting took place at the Museums Collection Centre in Nechells and was an opportunity to get to grips with a wide variety of fabric in the run up to the exhibition.  This particular workshop included wax prints designed and made in the United Kingdom, West Africa, and in the Netherlands.  This meant that we could finally get our hands on some Vlisco amongst a myriad of other styles and makes of cloth.  

During the second part of the meeting we were able to rifle through a clothes hanger full of clothes made with the pieces of cloth we had previously been handling.  The top below is a particular complicated piece, the bold blue and while print embellished with a sheer electric blue material and pearls:

Viewing handmade clothes like this helped focus our attention on what sort of clothing items we would like to have displayed in the exhibition, if at all.  We were also given an opportunity to flick through some magazines featuring recent African fashion house campaigns in order to get some inspiration:

During the final part of our workshop, we accompanied Adam to the temperature controlled warehouse where the special collections are housed, photographed and restored.  Here we were able to view some Yoruba adire cloth.  This particular style of West African cloth is my favourite; wax is melted on to the plain fabric, before being immersed in a special indigo dye, best produced by the Yoruba tribe of Nigeria.  The result? Fabulously complicated and individual two-tonal designs on vast sheets of fabric: