A group of students will finally get to see the results of a year-long project to put together their own professional art exhibition when they attend a VIP event at a gallery next week (April 11).

The teenagers at Shirebrook Academy will accompany friends and family to the event, at the Harley Gallery, after working together to painstakingly sift through 250 pieces of work in order to create an exhibition based on the theme of A Voyage of Discovery.

They were handed the task alongside pupils from two Worksop primary schools, Sparken Hill Academy and Sir Edmund Hillary Primary School, working with curator Selina Skipwith and using paintings drawn from the Jerwood Collection, a privately-owned collection of British art from the 20^th Century.

The collection includes valuable works by LS Lowry, Elisabeth Frink, David Hockney, Nicola Bealing and Yinka Shonibare, a replica print of whose 2020 painting Mayflower, All Flowers, is now hanging in Shirebook Academy’s atrium.

Initially working at home during lockdown and then in their classrooms, the students had to discuss which of the pieces of work they felt best reflected the theme, drawing on their own feelings and each artist’s inspiration behind the artwork.

They started off using small photographs of each piece of work and then visited the gallery across the course of a number of months to see the originals up close and decide where to hang them.

The exhibition, which rounds off a year of events at the Harley Gallery showing off the Jerwood Collection, officially opened in February, but the students’ visit will be the first time that the majority of them will have seen the finished product.

One of the students, Molly Holmes, 16, said: “I’m looking forward to seeing the exhibition, which was designed to explore a theme through the eyes of young people. I really liked that, because it’s not something that happens very often.

“It took a lot of hard work to put everything together. Everyone had a different opinion about which pieces to use and where to put them, so we had a lot of debates along the way.

“It taught us a lot about the meanings behind works of art and it would certainly inspire us to visit more art galleries in the future.”

Fellow student Freya Scott, 15, said: “We started off in lockdown and it was a really good thing to do because it took my mind off being home all the time and separated from my friends.

“Then when we did get together as a group it was nice because I didn’t know many of the others and it’s brought us all together.”

Nick Freer, head of art at Shirebrook Academy, said: “This was an unprecedented opportunity for our students to help curate an entire art exhibition using valuable pieces of work from successful and respected British artists.

“It was a wonderful project to be involved in and they have done a fantastic job in working hard to understand what the pieces of work are trying to say and interpreting them, in order to make sure that they fit the theme.”