Out of Hours

Text Lies and Audiotape 1

A partnership project between St Thomas the Apostle College and the Out of Hours Schools Programme at Tate Modern.

In the autumn term 2002, Year 8 students from St Thomas the Apostle College in Peckham took part in an art & literacy based project, working with artist educator Sam Gorman and two teachers from the school: Head of Art Kate Bennett and English teacher Rus Ekkel, The students explored a range of contemporary art from the Still Life/Object/Real Life display at Tate Modern and created art work inspired by their experiences in the galleries.

The project participants represented all levels of ability at the school. They are now familiar with many of the art works at Tate Modern and have developed new confidence in discussing modern and contemporary art.

Project Overview:

Txt, Lies & Audiotape focused on the role of language in the gallery context. Exploring the idea of appropriate and inappropriate forms of language the students took the formal writings of gallery text panels and translated them into text messaging language-with all its reliance on abbreviated words and heavy use of slang. The students then took the resulting text messages and developed them into designs, which were later printed onto T-shirts. The designing of our own T-shirts came from an interventionist idea to create quasi-official T-shirts comparable to the merchandise sold in the gallery shop.

Another aspect of the project stemmed from the plurality of responses the visiting public has to modern art. Taking Anish Kapoors’ giant sculpture in the Turbine Hall as a point of focus the students were sent out to eaves drop on visitors reactions to the work. This diverse range of overheard comments was then turned into text based designs and later carved into large wooden speech bubbles. The resulting work fused the transitory nature of the comments into a permanent carved form.

Project Participants

Patrick Okoji
John Guevera-Millan
Nathaniel Lessore
Felix Dickson
Thomas Bucher
Frank Wokoma
Max Behrens
Stefan Wade
Thomas Baxter
Kevin Mills
David Kimber
Kevin Boateng
Josh Kinch
Tyrone Brown
Jules Pinto

In association with