Over two weekends, the National Saturday Club and Scale Rule will welcome 10 Clubs and over 200 Club members to take part in a multi-disciplinary Masterclass at Tate Exchange. For the first time, these Masterclasses will be open for the public to take part.
Led by Scale Rule, the Masterclasses will give Club members and visitors to the Tate the chance to consider selected artworks from the Tate’s permanent collection guided by professionals from a host of disciplines including engineering, graphic design and architecture.
With a toolkit of 100,000 paper straws and 200,000 paperclips the sessions will culminate with the young people building and presenting sculptural responses to the artworks they have studied. Employing spatial and structural planning techniques, the groups will work together, collaborating and negotiating to create a piece that demonstrates the skills they have developed over the course of the Masterclass. There will also be a space for visitors to the Tate to build their own responses.
Masterclasses are a vital element of the National Saturday Club programme, allowing young people aged 13–16 unparalleled access to some of the best creative minds in the country and giving young people a truly memorable, informative and confidence-building creative experience.
A static display of work created from the sessions will be on display on 27, 30, 31 January and 1 February.
To see so much enthusiasm and creativity on a Saturday morning fills me with hope for the future of design. If those young people become the designers, clients or policy makers of the future, we're in safe hands.
David Lees, Architect, Masterclass 2017
About the National Saturday Club and Saturday Club Trust
Every Saturday, 13–16 year olds from across the UK are given the chance to discover their strengths and develop new talents by attending free Saturday Clubs at their local college, university, museum, gallery or other organisation. Each Club is devised locally by a network of partners who curate exciting programmes based on their own professional backgrounds and the unique facilities of the host institutions. Week by week, tutors introduce Club members to a wide variety of creative disciplines, expanding their horizons and emboldening them to become the next generation of imaginative thinkers and doers.
The Saturday Club Trust is an independent charity set up in 2016 to take over the development of the national network of Saturday Clubs from The Sorrell Foundation. There are currently 80 Clubs in 60 locations throughout the UK.
