Prometheus Match: Global Warming, 2021
Photographic work taken from a miniature sculpture originally made in 2019 for Miniscule Part 2 Cross Lane Projects.
This work is showing as part of a travelling exhibition in America called EarthLife, 1-21 February 2021. It has been organised by The House of Fairy Tales as part their new ambitious project called ‘The Great Imagining. The 15 artists’ images selected by artist/curator, Alice Herrick will start to build the vision for the transformative education programme, The Great Imagining, for secondary schools in the UK and beyond.
About the work
Deriving it's name from the early self-igniting Promethean Match developed by Samuel Jones around 1828, which consisted of a small glass potassium chloride coated capsule that contained sulphuric acid coloured with indigo, this work takes this little explosive ball and reinterprets it as our fragile blue planet. Samuel Jones' match was aptly named after the Greek Titan Prometheus, who allegedly stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity, thus igniting the human spirit and desire for knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge. Humanity, as it plays with this gift of fire, has ignited more than enquiring minds.
Earthlife is run by the Greenhorns from their new centre in Maine, New Hampshire. The Exhibition is starting in a gallery at the back of a farm shop near Silicon Valley, San Francisco.
THE GREAT IMAGINING ™ is an ambitious new education programme which is being designed as a two week, whole-school, fully immersive plug-in to the UK national curriculum.
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This colossal programme will draw on the best expertise from every field of knowledge and area experience enrolling the most brilliant minds, experts and creatives within the UK and beyond to create a syllabus, curriculum and exhibition programme to inspire young people to design a Greener, Fairer, Kinder future.
It is being designed as a distributive and iterative model that will work within every school setting. This model will be supported by a complementary teaching professionals training and enrolment programme that will generate inventive ingenuity within the staff as well as the students.
It is being designed to transform thousands of schools, with millions of students and participating audiences.
We are living in an unprecedented era of human existence with the majority of our populations ill equipped to deal with the speed and consequences of our own intelligence and behaviour.
Humans have uniquely flexible brains that are able to create what our imagination concieves. Our young people have a natural capacity for imagination which is currently being under-utilised and undervalued within our traditional education systems.
Through this programme we propose to engage the talents of our youngest citizens in addressing all of our futures and in doing so empower them in their own futures.
The Great Imagining™ is being produced by The House Of Fairy Tales which is a UK based young person’s arts and education charity which has been producing learning adventures for children and young people since 2006. Over that time the organisation has worked in partnership with dozens of national cultural and educational organisations including TATE, National Trust, Kingston University, Royal Shakespeare Company, Bowes Museum, Ironbridge Gorge Museum and Edinburgh Arts Festival as well as hundreds of schools throughout the UK.
For the EarthLife exhibition we invited 20 different creatives to give us an image which is inspired by the concept of The Great Imagining and its hugely varied syllabus and curriculum.
The people we approached were uniquely varied with the youngest being 7 years old and others include emerging artists, illustrators, designers, architects as well as visual artists who have exhibited internationally. The result is as varied as our human population.
The exhibition was then sent digitally and printed professionally in California to reduce the carbon footprint of a travelling exhibition while ensuring the richest possible experience.
Over the next few months and years we will be gathering thousands of images which will combine to create a vision of the future as we imagine it to be. These will be shown in exhibitions around the world and will inspire other connections and communities to do their own imagining.