Artists are being put to the test to represent sound in a visual artform, as part of a competition hosted by the charity, Helping Uganda Schools, and supported by ENT & Audiology News and the Manchester City Art Gallery.
Submissions are welcome from 1 July. Judging will be from 2 August, with an exciting panel of judges led by Fiona Corridan, Curator of the Grayson Perry exhibition at the Manchester City Art Gallery. The judges will be Prof Kevin Munro, Ewing Professor of Audiology, Manchester; founder of the Jinja Organisation of Parents of Deaf Children' (JOPDC), and ENT & Audiology News' very own Rosaleen Shine.
The winners in each category will be displayed in the Peter Mount Building, Manchester Royal Infirmary, and featured as ENT & Audiology News magazine covers. Categories are:
- Storytelling
- Concept
- Craft
- Emotion
- Connection
And a special category for the under 12s.
The art will be sold at auction to raise funds for a very special school in Uganda called St Francis de Sales School. This is in Jinja (the town at the source of the Nile) and is specially built to cater for young children with profound hearing loss, and other disabilities. The school is run by a grassroots Ugandan organisation called the Organisation of Parents of Deaf Children and is the centre of their network of social care for vulnerable poor families who care for a child with disability.
Hearing loss is common in Uganda, due to ear infections, complications of measles and side effects from malaria treatments. Deaf children are often denied an education and struggle to learn to talk or communicate in other ways, despite normal intelligence. Reading and writing skills can be very poor. This leads to long-term poverty, joblessness, and stigma. Research shows early intervention with targeted education and nutritious food in a safe environment, fundamentally alters a deaf Ugandan child’s outlook for life.
Funds will be used to buy specialist teaching equipment and also a new disability-safe kitchen, where the children can learn to cook and be provided with regular meals.
Helping Uganda Schools has funded schools and provided bursaries for the most impoverished of students since 1995. St Francis de Sales School will be our seventh school and second providing special needs education. We helped develop the Good Shepherd Special Needs School, in Fort Portal, Uganda, 10 years ago, which it is now a beacon of excellence. Pupils have gone on to study O level, A level and enter university. We estimate 2500 students have been educated at our schools over the past 20 years.
