http://fineartamerica.com/featured/striped-water-steve-purnell.html
I am not a regular blogger but I am really excited to announce that I was recently approached by Zsolt Hudack, a teacher in an educational establishment in Hungary requesting that I would allow him to use my work Striped Water (also known as Zebra Water) to be recreated by a group of underprivileged students. This is what Zsolt had to say:-
" I work in a secondary vocational school where almost half of the students are socio-economically underprivileged and/or gypsy minority students. I run the workshop in order to keep the students off the streets.
Since we are a partner institution of the LEGO factory based in our city, we have already had a few projects together. The biggest one so far was a 24-hour LEGO day, building a 25.000-brick LEGO map of our county. The design was by the American David Tracy (davidtrumantracy.com) and there were about 250 students , 30 teachers, and over a hundred local guests (artists, sportspeople, students) involved.
After this project, some of the students wanted to continue working with bricks, and so we did. They created some pictures and statues, and currently we have three projects going on simultaneously.
From the initial four students, the number of members have gone up to eight. All of the students are underprivileged, and/or minority students. Actually, before the end of the previous school year, there were five criminal cases going on against them. And the aim of the workshop is to help them find their place in the world, and to have them experience success.
To my great surprise the four students I started work with improved their academic results at the end of the school year as compared to the previous one. This helped us strengthen our support at LEGO.
From the beginning of this school year in September, we are aiming to have a certain goal for each semester. This is how my students came up with the idea of having an exhibition of 'black and white' pictures.
We are planning to have an exhibition of these black and white pictures in January of 2015. Since 2015 is the Year of Light by UNESCO, we wish to have this exhibition as part of our bigger project organized in our school. We hope to have the local media taking part in the event, however, with the approval of LEGO, we wish to involve the national media as well."
I am delighted to say that I have given my permission and that work is already underway. You can check out progress at Zsolt's Twitter feed @zshudak.The group also have a Facebook page called Tekerd.
The exhibition is due to be held on 29 January 2015. The venue is at Wesselenyi Miklos Vocational and Training School, 10-12 Dugonics Street, Nyiregyhaza 4400, Hungary.
