Well the Olympics are over and our cultural olympiad partner projects are coming to an end too. I hope you enjoyed the Jurassic Coast Earth Festival, especially Onboard Jurassic Airlines, the Pliosaur cinema, and 26&7 Bones; Coastal Voices or ExLab exhibitions across Dorset, the last of which is on at Bridport Arts Centre until November 24th, entrance FREE. Watch this space to see what happens to them next.
“That was absolutely fantastic. So engaging and funny.”
“The whole story and the Jurassic Coast in 10 mins. Amazing, funny, informative, loved it.” (passengers on Onboard Jurassic Airlines)
So far, according to the information that we have been able to gather to date, the projects involved over 1,100 participants and performed or exhibited to more than 35,000 people. The Earth Festival alone managed to get 331,578 google mentions over the five months. Around 250 people have taken the opportunity to sign up to get more involved in the work of the Jurassic Coast Partnership, so I hope that everyone finds this a satisfying experience.
“I’m going to be a scientist – imagining how sea creatures and land creatures do stuff”(Harris, aged 4; Pliosaur Cinema)
Ryder Spaceshell by Any Whale
I’d like to thank everyone involved in making all of this happen. It’s been a fun and exhausting summer and many people displayed super-human effort behind the scenes. We’ve had some very good feedback from audiences and participants as you can see and will be using all of this and the lessons that we have learned to take forward ideas for the next project which I am now focusing on developing leading up to the next Creative Coast Forum event in February where we will invite ideas.
If you didn’t make it to the last Creative Coast Forum event: Arts, Science and Environment, we had a brilliant day exploring how artists can be (and already are) involved in managing naturally designated sites. You can see the key note speech from Professor Deborah Dixon and some reflections on the day if you follow the link above.
All three of our PhD students are now in post and attended the day along with 58 others. I’d like to thank them and the whole team from Cultural Geography, Knowledge Transfer and Arts for their support in putting on a thought provoking day.
Daisy Sutcliffe, Creative Coast 2012 Coordinator.
