An update from Sylvie

Hello! My name’s Sylvie Evans and I’m one of the interns working on this exciting Future Memory in Place project. It’s great because, although we are working on different areas, we’re all able to work collaboratively as a team to share our skills, knowledge and experiences in this group project.

 

For my part, I’m a final year Fine Art student at Swansea Metropolitan University with a particular interest in large scale photomontage. I was lucky enough to first work with Catrin Webster and Elena Isayev in 2011 on the Future Memory in Place project which involved local schools and communities in Swansea. Graham Parker, one of the other interns, was also involved with that and we are both students on the same degree course; we’ve also exhibited work together and share a website, so we decided to submit a joint application for the internship.

 

I’m a mature student and, in my former career, I worked as a head teacher, spending thirty years in primary education. When I moved to Swansea 5 years ago, I decided to return to formal learning but this project has given me the opportunity to work with others, both as an artist and in schools. I particularly enjoyed the painting of the ‘blues’ and the postcards that we did with the children and loved it when the children’s faces lit up as they handled authentic ancient artefacts from the Etruscan period.

In September, I was lucky enough to be able to visit Tarquinia, near Civitavecchia and Rome in Italy, which is home to one of the best archaeological museums housing Etruscan artefacts in the world, as well as the amazing ‘Big Mounds of the Etruscan necropolis’ … but I’ll tell you more about that later!