working whispers
Creative Practitioner- Bill Taylor-beales
Multi-media
•Bill Taylor Beales is an experienced freelance Creative Arts practitioner.
•He specialises in visual mixed media, text, songwriting/recording, storytelling, sculpture, portraiture, film and music.
•He operates as a socially engaged artist in a wide range of disciplines and contexts.
•He has worked with a wide variety of groups including but not limited to, those in palliative care, children with learning difficulties, youth involved in the justice system and older members of the community on their own and as part of intergenerational initiatives.
Bill Taylor-Beales
My role was as a roving practitioner – documenting and adding elements in between the main disciplines. I established a foundation of creative process with the pupils and teachers based on the Five Creative Habits of Mind – Imagination – Persistence – Discipline –Inquisitiveness – Collaboration. I also taught a small film school to develop an eye for a picture and use different camera angles. We also went through how to write blogs and upload to the website. Alongside this I devised the 'Avachats' project to create characters based on the lives of miners and copperworkers and create backgrounds for the Chatterkids app characters as they recorded their dialogue.
We then moved onto devising the music and lyrics for the song and to overcome the restrictions of the pandemic music workshops moved online. Through regular Teams meetings between myself and the children we kept the creative process and the ability to share ideas, keeping collaboration at the heart of the process.
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My other role was creative consultant and ensuring there was a flow through of process between the artists.
The basic concept was to begin with a flat visual representation using the print then evolve this into a three dimensional process with the sculpture and then eventually hand this over to be interpreted by the dance element.
As we have had to rethink some element especially the final celebration event, we are waiting to see what health and safety aspects from the Covid -19 pandemic will play out in how we finally bring this amazing project into land.
I know that this was a hugely ambitious project with so many elements and ideas and interactions – a tremendously exciting collective of artists and teachers combined with so many hands on experiences and field trips with input from miners first hand and University experts.
The pupils and teaching staff were on a massive creative exploration that really unpacked the whole heritage of the mining community and the Copperopolis phenomenon.
It was a wonderful collaborative dovetailing between – schools – between artist between ideas and processes – with the teaching staff from the two schools getting a brilliant chance to work with each other and have their own CPD time.
A rich seam of creativity was definitely mined to it fullest potential despite the pause button that was the Covid -19 pandemic.