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The Clockwork Garden

@ The Bowes Museum

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Flying in from somewhere far out in the black of space, a strange mechanical seed has landed in our temporary exhibition gallery and unfurled to fill it with the beautiful interactive Clockwork Garden Exhibition. It needs to learn the secrets that make our human gardens so full of life, joy and beauty, so it can take them back to its own planet, which has no gardens of its own. But will the ominous Orange Moon and its shadowy Mechanized Grizzlies find the seed before it’s ready to return?

Only you can hold them at bay and fill the seed with enough wonder and joy to send it safely back into space…

The Clockwork Garden exhibition is an immersive and interactive installation full of strange metallic fronds, glimmering animations and whirring sounds. Inside it you will invent garden stories in the puppet theatre, dream in the clouds, make the garden bloom with colourful paper flowers, create mechanical artwork, puzzle out the magic of seeds and discover art from some brilliant contemporary artists.

In our own Earthly garden grounds you will be able to delve further into this fantastical story with The Clockwork Garden Adventure trail. Follow a curious, illustrated map and explore the grounds, finding tendrils of the mechanical seed, completing tasks and challenges and solving clues left by the wondrous characters of the Bowes’ founders, both historical and fictional…

This wondrous world has been specially created by national children’s arts charity The House of Fairy Tales.

Alongside all the interactive installations the exhibition will include artworks from: Gavin Turk, Sir Peter Blake, Mat Collishaw, Cabaret Mechanical Theatre, Simon English, Georgie Hopton, Simon Periton, Marvyn Gaye Chetwynd, Andrew Rae, Josh Knowles, Ian Dawson and Steven Claydon.

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