INSTALLATION from Saturday 27th June to Sunday 6th July, West Lawn, Salisbury Cathedral

During Late June/early July the international Artist’s Alex & Jan Grant (Toozalii Community Arts), Salisbury) will be showing their World’s Eye! touring installation in the grounds of Salisbury Cathedral as a public access display of 100 large Batik Flags, designed to encourage people to wonder through and experience the light, sounds, movement and colour of creativity.

This colourful Batik Flag installation is the continuing result of community engagement art works by the International Artists Alex and Jan Grant, currently linking the peoples of Japan and the UK.

Alex and Jan (the Salisbury based Toozalii Community Arts) were invited to work in Northern Japan after the 2011 Tsunami and Fukushima Nuclear Plant disasters to encourage multi age involvement, stimulate the rebuilding of communities and promote the engagement of people with issues.

As the artists researched the many concerns involved they decided to broaden the project to promote the awareness of these hugely disruptive issues towards communities across the South of England, encouraging them to support the Japanese people in an unusual and extremely visual way.

The Artists have been travelling out to Japan during the summer months to encourage local people in creating large scale drawings for the creation of the public installation flags.

These drawings are taken back to the UK where small local groups of adults are then supported, over the winter months, in learning to convert the Japanese drawings into these beautiful Batik Flags using the Hot Wax Batik process.

100 of these flags have already been taken back out to Japan, during summer 2014, and were shown at several large scale public venues where even more Japanese people have again been supported by Alex and Jan in creating new drawings for the UK teams to then work on during the following winter months.

As well as being displayed in Japan these beautiful batik flags will also be shown across the South of England at nine different public access venues between September 2014 and October 2015, with a second outing to Japan in summer 2015!

“To engage one community into the benefits of artistic creation is a positive outcome. To engage two communities into artistically supporting each other across a 12,000 mile gap, with such a visually exciting and publically accessible outcome, is just amazing!” Alex Grant, project artist.