Davina & Daniel collaborate with 100 school children to form a temporary choir at the Tate Britain

Pop Art
22nd May 2010
Tate Britain

Davina and Daniel were invited this academic year to take part in Tate Britain’s outreach project Verbal Eyes. For this project artists are commissioned to work in collaboration with schools to interpret artworks from the Tate Britain’s collection and make a new work in response that would have the opportunity to be presented amongst the collection. Davina and Daniel became increasingly interested in the relationship between ‘exhibition art’ and ‘education art’ (artwork produced for an educational goal) and the slippery blur between the two. They wished to play with this tension by working with the school groups to produce an artwork which itself would function as a direct interpretation tool of exhibition artworks, and therefore play with the relationship between the two types of production.

Coinciding with the popularity of programmes such as Choir of the Year, and the X Factor Davina and Daniel were keen to use the format of the choir as a naturally found collective art form to quietly challenge the stereotype of art-making being an isolated solo activity. They were also interested in using pop music, a form the arts which is more commonly enjoyed than visual arts, as a tool to engage with visual arts, to encourage people to interact with a selection of historical paintings through contemporary and familiar music. And since Davina and Daniel were asked to work with two schools, one primary and one secondary, forming a choir between the two schools seemed a perfect format for a collaborative cross-schools project.

The pupils, teaching staff and Davina and Daniel chose to work with the painting collection in Room 9: The Sublime in Crisis:Terror, Torment and Transcendence. Eight paintings were selected and the pupils explored pop songs for each painting. Next they worked with Gitika Partington, a singer/songwriter/vocal arranger/choral director and teacher with the kind support of Sing Up to learn to sing the pop songs as a large 100 people choir. The songs will be sung live in Room 9 by the choir on the 22nd May. More details coming soon.

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