This project was connected to artist Shaun Tan’s illustrations displayed at the Art Museum of Halland County during the winter of 2014/2015.
Artist and animator Frida Talik were tasked to develop a method that would work in the schools and she worked with the Art Pedagog at the Art Museum of Halland County, who connected the exhibition at the museum with Frida’s workshop. In this particular case, the project was developed by these two parties, after which Halmstad Town Council showed an interest and offered it to their schools as a part of the “Creative Schools” process.
All the 160 pupils that participated from year 2-6 were first taken to a guided tour of the exhibition with an art tutor at the museum. The exhibition had a philosophical air about it as it was based on Shaun Tan’s surreal, existential images and books.
After this Frida Talik visited all the classes, where the pupils worked at animation stations incorporating computers, cameras and boxes. They worked mainly with cutout animations and stop-motion technique. Each class got to work with Frida on the animated film clips during two full school days, where the class were sometimes divided in two and sometimes split into smaller groups of three-four pupils. It was up to each school to choose how and where the film clips would be presented and displayed.
The animation equipment was partly borrowed by the artist and partly by Halland Art Museum. The Halmstad schools that participated in the project were Stenstorpsskolan, Brunnsåkersskolan, Frösakullsskolan and Andersbergsskolan.
Shaun Tan
Shaun Tan (born 1974) lives in Australia and is one of the most prominent children’s book illustrators in the world. He has published twenty something books, all translated into several different languages. He has also worked with theatre and film. In 2011 his film The Lost Thing was awarded an Oscar for best animated short film and he received the ALMA award that same year too.
