Puzzle Project UK

About

Like puzzle pieces, people acquire and change colour and pattern over the course of their lives, sometimes gradually drifting apart, and sometimes forgetting that deep inside we are truly fractions of a whole. We become akin to pieces of a puzzle scattered over a table — simultaneously diverse and also the same, yet so hard to put together… The artists involved in the Puzzle Project represent a fresh new initiative that originated from Osaka, Japan, having crossed the boundaries of continents to reach UK audiences. The project explores and experiments with the interplay of image and text. Each of the artists articulates a word, which they associate to the project or to their own individual work. The pieces show connections and disconnections whilst simultaneously continuing to belong to one single puzzle piece. The project by nature is meant to reflect the way in which people converge and interact in urban centres, where boundaries between strangers and friends blur and we build a new city and our own personal narratives. The completed Puzzle will be a large-scale artwork, made up of 120 individual smaller pieces from each artist. It is based on the original Japanese concept of sixty artists creating their own puzzle pieces, whilst being unaware of the contents of the other participants' work. The UK project involves 60 artists from Japan and 60 artists from the UK, Sweden, Mexico, Hungary and other countries, thus bringing people of many nationalities together through art and play. The project aims to enrich and engage with the local community by stimulating a reaction to the pieces. In a specially organised workshop, members of the local community will create their own puzzle pieces to be displayed as part of the final artwork.