Big Fish Band entertained the croud at the Launch

Rushenden Public Art Launch 

Saturday 13^th November, 11am-1pm

Location; Room, Rushenden Court, Rushenden, Sheppey.

The Launch was a fun-packed morning, with plenty of free activities including special fish postcard colouring in competition, free face-painting, speeches and food. Over 50 residents attended and  the workshop participants uncovered the stone sculpture at 12 noon, after introductory speeches by Byran Mulhern, and the queenborough Mayor.

The three projects being launched were; The Shoalstone Sculpture and relief carving by the local community, the Medichem Blue Fence project, and the Art at the Centre Mobile Space.

Shoalstone 

Shoalstone is a sculpture that celebrates the sense of community that the artist encountered when spending a week running stone carving workshops in Rushenden. The workshops were held at The Gateway and around Rushenden. The themes that arose from the workshops focused on Rushenden being on the Swale and Medway estuary, local fish and fictional sea creatures featured strongly in the drawings and carvings made by children and adults during the week. The fish represented in the sculpture (eels, rays, flat fish etc) are all local to the Swale and Medway estuary. The relief carvings interweave and overlay producing a symbolic and dynamic sense of community and place. The local participants produced 80 individual stone carvings. The finished workshop carvings have been integrated into the new scheme that forms the setting for the main sculpture    

'Rushenden Colour Palette' (Medichem Fence Project)

The concept for the fence project was to create a colour palette for Rushenden, taken from images taken by local photographers, as part of the Roaming Perspectives photography workshop. The photographic walk produced beautiful images of Rushenden which were then simplified using a computer program into a range of colours to be selected for the Medichem fence. The fence slats have been painted a range of 16 shades of blue to reflect the range found naturally in the nearby natural landscape, captured by local artist Charlotte Huggins in her photograph entitled  ‘Different Perspective’. Viv involved volunteers and local teenagers took part in fence painting sessions organized by Art at the Centre during September 2010.

Photographs by Charlotte Huggins