We were very privileged today to have a visit from Andy & Lin McKeown of Wild Strawberry. Andy is a very talented artist who works predominantly in Light & Sound, you may well have seen some of his light shows projected onto the buildings around the town (or further afield) at Christmas time or indeed throughout the year. They have been in school today recording our Year 4, 5 & 6 children (and some of the staff) as part of the One Name, One Voice project.
Andy and Lin have been working together on this project since 2015. There are 5,286 men and women on the World War I Roll of Honour in Shropshire and they are being remembered and commemorated by 5,286 individuals putting their own voices to the names of the fallen. We are honoured to be the only school Andy has recorded in, although you may have seen the One Name, One Voice team about the town at various shows and events collecting voices.This exciting installation should be complete by September and will be permanently available online, Andy has promised to bring the pop up installation into school for us all to experience first hand, I think it will be quite a poignant piece of art, we will let you know when you too can come in and hear it.
I was so proud of the children today they were each given a card with the details of one of these men or women and after a quick practice they read the name (and a number for reference only) there were only a few retakes, mostly due to background noises. The children were all so sensible and spoke clearly, even though some of them were a little nervous. I could see quite a few of the children were really moved when they saw the ages of their given soldier, somehow having the extra details of age, time of death etc made it more real to them. They all have a card to bring home so hopefully they will share it with you. They may wish to do a search on Google to see if they can find out anything more about their named person as a further act of remembrance.