Stolen Lives: Private viewing

Tonight I was at the St Bride Foundation for a private viewing of Stolen Lives, a new web based project which looks at issues of historical and contemporary slavery through music, songs, words, images, film and animation.

Stolen Lives is a collection of 17 freely dowloadable multi-media animations which will be of use to schoolteachers, especially those teaching at Key Stage 3 (ages 11 - 14) and Key Stage 4 (ages 14 – 16), but also to youth groups, museums, music and dance groups, and churches and faith groups. The project is also interactive with the website enabling users to post their own performances or interpretations of the material, allowing for a much broader sharing of ideas and practice.

Stolen Lives is a collaborative, open-educational project, bringing together academics (The Wilberforce Institute - Hull University), musicians (Paul Field and others), artists (Peter S. Smith) and educationalists (Sue James).

Paul Field is composer & Creative Director for the project. He has worked as a Songwriter, Composer, Producer and Performer in the UK and around the world. From the release of his first album 'In your eyes' (with Nutshell) he has written around 800 songs over four decades. He has received an Ivor Novello Award from the British Academy of Songwriters and Composers and a Dove Award (and two nominations) from GMA in Nashville along with numerous other awards from ASCAP in the USA. He has had #1 chart success with his songs in the UK, USA, Holland, South Africa and Germany. He has received many Platinum and Gold records for his work.

Peter S Smith, who created the visuals for the project, is a Painter/Printmaker with a studio at the St Bride Foundation in London. He studied Fine Art at Birmingham Polytechnic and Art Education at Manchester. In 1992 he gained an MA (Printmaking) at Wimbledon School of Art. Examples of his work can be found in private and public collections including Tate Britain and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. His book 'The Way See It' (Piquant Press) is a visual monograph of contemporary work by a professional artist who is a Christian, which provides an illustrated introduction to the art of engraving.

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Stolen Lives - Midnight Rain.