Arts Awards: Be an audience

by Maia F

I was driven up to Shrewsbury to look at a couple of art exhibitions with the rest of my arts award  class. Our first stop was a small arts and crafts shop set out of the way down a side road.  

The shop was fairly small, but still contained a lot of different artworks. Often these were grouped  together, but these groups were not always all of one type of artwork. Some pieces were separated from anything like them.  

Some of the pieces were what you might traditionally think of as art, paintings and sculpture and  drawings. But there were other things that I had never considered as artwork before; I saw knitted  dolls, jewellery and even pens!

Most of the artwork was beautiful and even those things that I wasn’t so sure about, such as the  sculptures, were interesting to look at. I was particularly fascinated by the pens, as they were both  surprisingly and pretty. Surprising because I wouldn’t have expected them to count as an artwork,  but still a wonderful mix of colours. 

I would have been happy to stay in that shop all day, but we had to leave to visit the Bear Steps  gallery.  

The gallery was almost the opposite of the arts and crafts shop. The building was larger and the art  was both spread out and grouped much more obviously. There also wasn’t as much variety.  

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Nonetheless, I liked most of the art on display. There were sculptures of animals,primarily dogs, and sea and fieldscenes made of some kind of layered stones or crystals, that were interesting and quite nice to look at, but my favourites were the paintings. They were mostly of shorelines, rivers,and fields, and looked very realistic.

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Unfortunately, we had to be finished by eleven so we didn’t get as much time to look around as I might have liked, but we did see plenty of interesting and beautiful things, and some that were entirely new to me as artforms.