LAUNCESTON, TASMANIA – BANNERS, POSTCARDS AND STICKERS

The Arts Roar project integrated marginalised young people with physical and intellectual disabilities into a broader arts festival and cultural activities. At the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery’s Youth Studio in Launceston, five young people with disabilities and three TAFE graphic design students collaborated with Visionary Images to create a series of artworks that investigated ‘diversity’ for a local youth arts festival. Visionary Images’ Creative Director mentored the team as a whole, while the students mentored the participants with disabilities in computer use and digital imaging software.

The topic of diversity was introduced to the young people, and they quickly got involved in a discussion about how they felt about the way people treated them. An experience they shared was that they had all been bullied as a result of being seen as ‘different’ and ‘disabled’. This developed as a significant theme and informed the direction of the artwork.

A series of three collaboratively created artworks were developed around the idea of bullying. Exhibited on the back of Metro Tasmania buses, on the outer wall of the Anglicare Central Office, and in the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery exhibition space, the images attracted a high level of public comment. The final images, formatted into posters, cards and banners, were also used in schools for workshops on bullying.

Other individual artworks were created by participants and these were produced as cards, with one of the artworks later used to draw community attention to wheelchair accessibility.