From 7 – 18 July 2008 the Port of Liverpool Building will play host to the Rathbones Summer Exhibition 2008 which will showcase the creative skills of Liverpool’s youth. We have invited the students of Liverpool’s secondary schools to provide entries for the exhibition; the best of these will be displayed over these two weeks.

The exhibition will represent three topical, yet fairly abstract themes: Capital, Culture, and Grace. We want students to express their understanding of these themes using their own particular skills to represent them.

The Rathbones Summer Exhibition will not be about art in the traditional sense of the word and we hope that students with lots of different skills will enter pieces for exhibit. Ideally these themes will inspire and challenge Liverpool’s students to use their imagination to create original pieces across a diverse range of different media. Entries will be judged on their own merit in terms of how effectively a particular theme has been explored.

The only limitation is that we must be able to display entries throughout the course of the exhibition, so for example, whilst we would be happy to display an effective piece of choreography, this would need to be presented on video. We anticipate that this will encourage some students to work in a collaborative group in order to exploit their particular skills.

The Rathbones Summer Exhibition is intended to showcase the originality and creativity of Liverpool’s students across a very broad spectrum of different skills; from the more traditional artistic mediums, such as paint, sculpture and photography, to the use of textiles, sound, film, computer graphics and the written word. We think that the Rathbones Summer Exhibition will provide a wonderful opportunity to present the city’s young talent!