Pop Paolozzi! 

Exhibition at the University of St Andrews 

A series of prints by S1 pupils at Drummond Community High School (http://www.drummond.edin.sch.uk/ ), one of our project partners in Edinburgh. The prints are based on the life and work of Eduardo Paolozzi, the renowned transnational artist 
 
 
Sir Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) is one of the UK’s most outstanding modern artists. Born in Leith, the son of first generation Italian migrants, Paolozzi was interned in 1940 when Italy entered WW2.  He later studied art in Edinburgh and London before moving to Paris. He established a reputation on a global scale as sculptor and major figure in the Pop Art movement. He also grew up speaking Edinburgh Scots, English, Italian and the dialect of the Monte Cassino area where his family came from. Paolozzi also had a fascination for the processes of translation in all its forms
 
The work that will be on display has been produced by S1 pupils at Drummond Community High School, Edinburgh, very close to where Paolozzi grew up. Under the guidance of art teachers Philippa Drummond and Louise Fraser, the seventy pupils in S1 researched Paolozzi’s own transnational experience to produce prints expressive of both his Italian-Scots childhood and fascination with the modern, mechanical world. 

The pupils worked on Paolozzi over the course of a term. Margaret Hills de Zàrate, a CI on TMF, worked alongside one group of pupils and conducted a series of interviews with them as part of her own work on artistic practice and translation. The interviews have also provided detailed qualitative feedback on the project from the students’ perspective. 

The 8 prints in the exhibition were created by the artists at Edinburgh Printmakers (http://www.edinburghprintmakers.co.uk/), sponsored by SNIPEF (Scottish and Northern Ireland Plumbing Employers Association: http://www.snipef.org/
), a major local employer which works closely with the School. Under the guidance of practitioners at the Studios, students learned how to make screen prints in a professional artistic context. 

The 8 pupils whose work was chosen for the exhibition came to St Andrews for the official opening along with their two art teachers and Birgit Harris, the School’s Community Education Officer who is on the project’s Advisory Board. The pupils also visited the special collection of MUSA (http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/musa/) which holds some original work by Paolozzi.

The exhibition was curated by Laura Pels Ferra, a practising artist and research administrator in the School of Modern Languages, and a team of Year 2 students at St Andrews. The students took part in the project as part of the University’s Curriculum Enhancement Programme.
 
We are collaborating with Drummond on a range of activities over the duration of the project and one of the keys strands of our work will be an ongoing collaboration with the Art Department exploring practices of artistic translation in different media.