Creativity flourishes at BG - Unge ord og bilder 2023

Creativity flourishes at Birkerød Gymnasium HF, IB and boarding school (BG), where students work with visual arts and creative writing both inside and outside of class. But what happens to the art when it has finished being exhibited at this year's student exhibition and what happens to the literature when the final period has been put in the creative writing club?

The book here is a selection of the texts students have written in the creative writing club and a selection of art students' works from the school year 2022-23. Literature and the visual arts are in many ways closely related forms of expression, and it is therefore only natural to try to unite them in a single work. In this book visual art and literature are precisely allowed to stand side by side, because we believe that the works and texts of young visual artists and creative writers deserve to be experienced by more people and over a longer period of time.

The book is intended as a gift for the school's students - it must be available at the school and ideally be part of the school's public space. The hope is that the publication can inspire more people to write and create art themselves and, not least, create conversations around the school.

The literary material is created by students from the school's creative writing club, which meets approx. 12 times during a school year and works in the club with various writing techniques and tasks, as well as a handful of students from Pre-IB and students who have submitted texts to the "Young Words" competition. The collection of texts spans widely over short stories, poems, songs and love/dislike lists and nicely shows how much space there is to explore and experiment with one's writing in the creative writing club.The visual material in the book was created by students from the B team at STX, and 3u visual art at IB.

As an important part of 3u's final exam, the IB students make an exhibition which shows all the works they have made during their two years with Art in high school. The exhibition must also show that the student relates to his audience, and therefore all 3.u's works are supplemented with a small text that explains the background for the creation of the work. The exam exhibition hung for two days at the end of March, 2023, in the school assembly hall. Visual arts at B level in STX end their year with an independent exam project.

As the works have not been exhibited at the school, it is a great pleasure that they are also included in the book, so that they can be seen. The book shows the many different themes that have occupied STX and IB students: there are feminist works about gender and power and identity and religion; and works about the war in Ukraine! Other themes include young people's relationship with technology and drugs, and man's relationship with nature.

In this book, the visual arts and literature become a depiction of being young - and in a way the works tell a recognizable story about being young, while at the same time they also paint a picture of what occupied the students in that particular year, that art became. Feeling recognized in a character in a short story, a poem, a picture or a certain theme can be both unsettling and liberating. But it is not only about being able to reflect in art, but also about the fact that through literature and the visual arts we get a unique insight into another person's life, experiences and issues, and through this we get the opportunity to recognize the other person and perhaps also unknown sides of ourselves. This is, among other things, what art can do.

We would like to thank the young people who have contributed to this anthology and thereby helped to create, develop and inspire local art and literary activity for, with and by young people. However, it is also a project that, in a broader sense, is about the role that art and literature can play in the lives of today's youth. In 2022, it emerged in a study that Dansk Industri commissioned from Epinion that the experience, i.e. the encounter with art and the creations of culture, has great importance for the quality of life of as many as three out of four Danes. There is thus a connection between art and well-being. Art! What is so floating, so difficult to measure, so beautiful and deep and so fantastic and visionary is therefore directly connected to how well we feel.

We think that literature and the visual arts suit and inspire each other very well and we hope that you will enjoy reading the book.

The book was created together with our partner Kristian Engberg, who is behind the publishing house 21:34 and the Unge ord competition, in which our students from the creative writing club diligently participate.

Linda Falkesgaard and June Clausager Thomsen