Art Appreciation in Liverpool

With a close friend living in Liverpool, and working in the local arts scene, we end up taking lots of trips over there and visiting the impressive mass of galleries and museums there.  Back in the summer we took a jaunt over, visiting a few places, starting with...

...the Bluecoat.

A very interesting interactive show was being hosted, colourful and with a mix of audio-visual pieces, sculpture, playground pieces/dressing-up for the kids, and more besides.  I'll apologise at this point that I didn't get much in the way of detailed caption information to go with these pics on the blog today, largely because the Childs were having such a fun time with everything that we spent all our time watching them, just snapping the odd pic of works we liked...

This room, with wall space for chalk-drawing, proved very popular with The Childs...

...who provided plenty of evidence that our tastes have somewhat influenced them in three years of fostering.

Upstairs, they were very taken with the structure-building workshop, with films playing detailing the construction of some of the first playgrounds.

After Bluecoat, we went onto the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, which had a more audio-visual leaning on this visit.  Lots of darkened rooms with dramatically lit pieces, very eye catching.

Yet again, we were so busy on Child herding duty we managed to miss the captions for most of this stuff...

More interactive bits for visitors...

...but most fascinating, particularly for the Elder Child was the 3D Printing demonstration.

We set off back towards the Albert Dock thereafter.  Its nice that amongst all the gentrified bits of the city (massive shopping centres and all) there's still a lot of 'old' Liverpool, the slightly run-down post-industrial City that we used to visit, prior to the shot in the arm which came from being the City of Culture.

The pics shot in the museum will end up on the Model Making blog, as it was research for a project which sent us in there.  So to finish, some pics of a somewhat dramatic storm rolling in off the Mersey...