A showcase of artwork created by 12-17 year olds exploring the arts. SitC and Durham University’s Oriental Museum’s first online Bronze Arts Award.
SitC and the Oriental Museum’s Arts Award programme is supporting 28 young people from The Girls’ Network to achieve their Bronze award, inspired by the collections at Durham University’s Oriental Museum and the three strands of SitC; art, music and theatre and its overarching theme of ‘home’.
Although the museum is closed to the public, the team at the Oriental Museum are busy behind the scenes planning their major new gallery, Silk Roads. These displays will provide an introduction to the Museum, bringing together works from across the collection to tell stories of trade, travel and exchange across the continent of Asia and into Europe, all the way to Durham. You can find out more about the project here.
The Arts Council for England are generously supporting an Arts Award programme linked to this gallery development. This programme centred on visits to the Museum by local young people. As the world went into lockdown, we moved into a virtual world and explored how to deliver Bronze Arts Award online…
It was not just silk, spices and ceramics that travelled along the Silk Roads. At the same time people exchanged knowledge, learned about other cultures and were influenced by new artistic styles. Taking this exchange of art and learning as our theme, we are working with students from The Girl’s Network (a charity established to inspire and empower girls from the least advantaged communities) from across the UK. We want to explore the ways that forming knowledge and showing creativity and communication can lead to a greater understanding of the vast range of different art forms around us all, even during lockdown.
Whether you want to take part in an ART SKILLS SHARE, view the student’s EXHIBITION, find out who INSPIRES them or read their REVIEWS of events they took part in during lockdown, you can view all of their work by following the links below:
What makes a home, a home?
Finally, the students were asked to investigate ‘What makes a home, a home?’ and created a piece of artwork responding to the festival theme of home, researching several artists associated with the Silk Roads whose work features in the Oriental Museum collection, and exploring how an artist’s concept of home in Asia or North Africa may differ from their own in the UK. This page will be updated with work over the course of June.
Who you’ll become by Emily
In response to the Oriental Museum’s Celestial Globe.
Find out more about the Celestial globe here.
my song is related to a globe of stars…light in the darkness
Emily
The development of the Silk Roads gallery has been made possible through the generous support of the DCMS/Wolfson Foundation Museum and Galleries Improvement Fund, the Arts Council for England, the Sir James Knott Trust and the Islamic Art and Material Culture Subject Specialist Network. We are very grateful for all of their support.

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If you want to work on your Arts Award from home, you can either get in touch to see if we are running any funded projects or alternatively pay for the fees yourself.
We would not charge to assess your work, you would only need to pay for the moderation in order to receive your certificate. You can find out our Arts Award programmes here.