Date: Saturday 1 October 2022 – Saturday 29 October 2022
Free Entry
Location: Foyer, ground floor
Monday – Saturday. 10am – 4pm.
Closed Sundays & Bank Holidays.
Plan your visit here.
A new arts project in Sefton challenges young people to use photography and fashion as a tool for championing social and environmental rights, and explores how images can be used to agitate.
Open Eye Gallery has been working with long-standing collaborators New Beginnings youth group, The Atkinson (Southport) and two new artists in residence, Ocean Farini and Sally Gilford on Protest of Identity. Together they worked to produce their own series of fashion items which has culminated in a public exhibition at The Atkinson.
For this new project, a group of young people called New Beginnings who are from in and around Bootle, came together to talk and create in a space they knew well. Originally formed before the start of the COVID outbreak, the New Beginnings youth group decided to focus on a previous exhibition at The Atkinson, Westwood, as the starting point to explore the role of fashion and photography in society today.
The exhibition celebrated the design work of Vivienne Westwood, one of the last independent global fashion companies in the world. Westwood continues to capture the imagination and raise awareness of environmental and human rights issues through her work.
However, lockdown brought many challenges for the group and eventually the original youth group moved on – opening up the opportunity for a new group of young people to begin exploring the project Protest of identity.
Protest of identity is all about exploring the potential of the politics of textiles and clothes, how we can use them as tools for expression and change, as well as questioning when these things blur the lines between fashion, sculpture, and political statement. What is possible when we use them as a medium for our own private protests for things that matter to us?