Emily’s Adventures in Work Experience Part 2

Hello everybody!

Before the Summer Holidays I took part in the Silk River project during my work experience at Kinetika. The project explores the relationship between London and Kolkata through artistic exchange between twinned communities along the River Thames and India’s Hooghly River. During the artist residencies in June, artists and members of the local communities along the Thames created ten 6m hand-painted silk scrolls, each representing a community and showing the links to their twinned location in India. You can read more about my work experience and how the flags were created in my first blog post here.

In September the UK Silk River walks consisted of ten walks starting at Kew on the 15^th September and finishing at Southend on the 24^th September for the finale at Southend Pier, before boarding the Waverley back to London. Each of the walks told the story of the local community, with 2 flags being added each day.

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During my work experience I was mostly involved in creating the East Tilbury flag, where I designed the paw prints, tug-of-war and the production line that are featured on the flag. For the project, East Tilbury is twinned with Batanagar in India as both were locations of Bata shoe factories which were set up by Tomas Bata in the 1930’s. Luckily for me, the East Tilbury walk was on a Saturday so I was able to go along, and I even got to hold the flag during the performance at the War Memorial, which was an honour. As the flags are 6 metres long, they are put on 7 metre telescopic poles during the walks, which are actually pretty heavy but I managed to hold it for just under an hour, which I am very proud of. The performance by the Complete Commedia Company explained the story of Tomas Bata and his shoe factory which the flag was based upon and it was very funny but also informative.

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I also attended part of the Southend walk on the Sunday, which I really enjoyed as I was able to see all of the flags together, and walk with them along the esplanade from the Crowstone in Westcliff to Southend Pier. I joined this walk in the afternoon, before the walk I hadn’t heard of the Crowstone before, which is an obelisk on the beach, so we were not sure how far along we needed to walk, or whether we’d gone too far, but luckily we spotted the flags coming around the corner of Chalkwell Avenue and we raced ahead to catch up with them as they stopped by the Crowstone. We then joined the walk along the esplanade towards the pier; we were near the back of the line, but to be fair we had just walked the same route but in the opposite direction. Once we were at the pier, I stayed at the balcony on the land end (because I have said many times to just about everyone I know, “I will never ever go down a pier again!” as I got a really bad migraine half way down the pier last month and it was horrible!). I got some lovely shots of the flags parading down the pier, and I was able to watch them boarding the Waverley on the Facebook live stream.

 

To find out more about the project visit the Silk River website here. The flags will lead the opening procession of the Diwali Celebration in Trafalgar Square on Sunday 15^th October, and they will be exhibited at Kew Gardens from  Sunday 22^nd October until Friday 27^th October. After that the flags will travel to India for the Silk River walks through the twinned communities along the Hooghly River from 5th to 17th of December 2017.

I hope you enjoyed reading my post! Follow me on Instagram @emily.m.adventures and @princessemily_m for daily updates, and Twitter @EmilyMAdventure for info on my next blog post.

Emily M x