Belfast Collage Toolkit
Albert McAlpine, Jan McCullough, Alex Synge
100 Archive, Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Belfast City Council
English
Box with loose images, instruction leaflet, and cardboard
page
225 × 320 mm
2024
The Belfast Collage Toolkit, based on the artwork of artist Jan McCullough, introduces children to the art of collage-making and encourages their creativity through a hands-on workshop. Using images of Belfast sourced from a historic photographic archive made by photographer Albert E. McAlpine, it invites children to participate in a world-building experience through which they can imagine their own high street, shops, stories and cities. Each kit provides teachers with an invitation and a set of instructions to help primary school-aged children engage with the core themes of McCullough’s work and research in a playful and inventive way. The randomised type treatment was inspired by the multitude of letterforms found in the mostly hand-painted shopfront signage found in the photos; mismatched letter are in turn collaged together in the spirit of the project. Kits were designed and built in a modular fashion; A4 boxes filled with A4, A5 and DL sized elements, and a small loop-bound booklet with hand-cut cover was produced to accompany the kit and succinctly guide the teacher through the process of leading the collage-making activity with their class.
(Source: www.100archive.com/projects/belfast-collage-toolkit)
About the Artist
Albert E. McAlpine was a prominent local photographer in Belfast in the 1980’s.
www.glenvale.com
Jan McCullough is an artist from Northern Ireland. Her work explores the human acts of construction, fabrication and DIY, and the communities of interest and place that form around them – employing the materials and languages associated with these activities to create sculptural installations, interventions and photographs.
www.janmccullough.co.uk
(Source: www.janmccullough.co.uk/about)
Alex Synge is graphic designer living and working in Belfast. He works with a wide range of clients and collaborators, primarily in the arts and cultural fields. He has worked with Ireland at Venice, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Kerlin Gallery, Kunstverein Aughrim, Jupiter Artland, EVA International, FRUIT SHOP, ANNEX, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, RGKSKSRG, Naughton Gallery, Irish Architecture Foundation, Project Arts Centre, RIBA and more.
thefirst47.com
(Source: www.upholdart.co.uk/artist-alex-synge)
About the Publisher
The 100 Archive is a platform for design in Ireland, founded in 2012 by the communication design community. At the core of our activity is the publication of 100 notable projects selected through an annual open call. These yearly archives contain work from the ever broadening area of communication design (graphic, editorial, type, brand, digital, motion…) across a range of applications: from flyers for a club night to international corporate rebrands and from identities for small businesses to campaigns for major social movements. As well as capturing contemporary communication design, we publish articles, produce events and deliver projects that interrogate design’s impact on the world and look at where design in Ireland is now in order to establish where it’s going in the future. We partner with designers, professional bodies, government agencies and national institutions to reinforce the importance of design in life, society, commerce and culture and to build engaged audiences for design in Ireland.
www.100archive.com
(Source: www.100archive.com/about)
The Arts Council of Northern Ireland is the development and funding agency for the Arts in Northern Ireland. They support artists and arts organisations through a range of funding opportunities.
artscouncil-ni.org/
(Source: artscouncil-ni.org/about-us)
Belfast City Council is the local authority for Belfast, the capital and largest city of Northern Ireland. With a unique geographic location between Europe and the US, we also have strong links with the rest of the island of Ireland through the Dublin Belfast Economic Corridor.
www.belfastcity.gov.uk/
(Source: www.belfastcity.gov.uk/investinbelfast/connections/about-us)
