Chiang Mai | Arts education project in border region | Printmaking exhibition

H Gallery in Chiang Mai, Thailand presents Dreams and Other Thoughts: Art by Children in Refuge, a collection of fine art prints by children and teenagers from three ethnic groups living in the border region of northern Thailand. An arts education project in the region was led by printmakers Jacqueline Gribbin (Australia) and Ralph Kiggell (UK, based in Thailand) who developed woodblock prints with children and young people in schools. Organized with Blood Foundation, an NGO based in the province of Fang, Dreams and Other Thoughts is the result of workshops carried out at three of their schools and led by the artists Jacqueline Gribbin and Ralph Kiggell, based in Australia and Thailand respectively. Printmaking techniques in Dreams and Other Thoughts are mainly derived from traditional Japanese woodblock methods and the domestic scenes and motifs on view belie the precarious social position of these young artists, whose families have typically fled Burma and now occupy an ambiguous legal position in relation to Thailand. Gribbin and Kiggell followed a workshop model originally set up in the Northern Territory of Australia where remote Aboriginal peoples tap into their local graphic traditions to create expressive prints for a wider audience. Dreams and Other Thoughts explores this possibility in order to draw attention to lives lived with uncertainty and the flights of thinking that can attend such a state of existence.