Record number of designs submitted for Elephant Parade national tour

The intu Elephant Parade national tour reaches a new milestone this week - with the 8,500th design submitted for the tour’s digital show reel.

As shopping centre giant intu takes Elephant Parade around the UK for a 14-stop national tour, it hopes to raise large sums of money for the Asian Elephant Foundation by selling the tour elephants to support the conservation charity. In addition to fundraising, intu and Elephant Parade shared a goal at the outset of the project to use the tour as a national platform to raise greater awareness of elephant conservation by involving people directly in the tour, taking it beyond an appreciation of other people’s art.

With available artist places for the UK tour becoming fully subscribed in record time, tour sponsor intu responded by setting up a digital show reel to run alongside the touring elephants. This show reel gives a platform for other people’s design ideas to feature in the touring exposition in 2D format. Some drawings have adopted serious conservation themes, others have focused on joy and hope through vibrant designs - but every idea has been shown on screens at the intu tour venues alongside the brightly painted Elephant Parade statues.

Within weeks of launching the show reel, artists around the UK submitted design ideas. School children have also set to work painting a brighter future for the Asian elephant, submitting bold art designs. A downloadable design template was added to the tour website (www.intuelephantparade.co.uk) and art workshops became a feature of the tour at each of the intu host venues. The dozens of ideas submitted a week became hundreds. By Christmas 2013, 2,000 design ideas had been submitted and this has soared further in the first two months of 2014.

This week, the number of design ideas submitted has hit the 8,500 mark. For the first time, the intu show reel has given people of all ages - from all walks of life and of all artistic ability levels - the opportunity to take part in an Elephant Parade. Recent design ideas submitted range from an idea from an 18-month old baby to a design idea from chart-topping singer Example and his wife Erin McNaught.

To add local flavour to the national tour, a local art theme will be adopted for many of the 2014 tour venues. When the elephants visited Nottingham for five weeks in January, the local intu team ran a competition for local people to submit designs for a Robin Hood elephant, with the winning idea being commissioned as a tour replica, giving the city its own signature design for the tour. When Elephant Parade visited intu Braehead, Scotland, local people designed ideas that celebrated Glasgow’s hosting of this year’s Commonwealth Games. For the tour’s arrival at intu Potteries, this week the Stoke team has launched a local design competition that celebrates Stoke’s status as the home of pottery and fine china. The competition has prompted design creations for the show reel from iconic designers Emma Bridgewater and Wedgewood. These local initiatives add further to the number of designs and range of ideas being submitted for the digital show reel.

For many lucky people the designs don’t just finish up in the show reel. More than 75 school children will gain commissions during the 375-day national tour to translate their ideas onto an Elephant Parade statue that will join the tour. An additional 10 school children will have their design ideas produced as miniatures replicas available to buy in the Elephant Parade store. Elephant Parade is also considering commissioning some of the design ideas to feature on full size statues at future Elephant Parades scheduled for Hong Kong, Dubai and Brazil in the next 18 months.

Trevor Pereira, commercial director at intu commented: “We always wanted to make this event the people’s parade. For this Elephant Parade we have lowered the auction prices to give more people the chance to own their own art piece and we aim to have given more that 10,000 people the chance to be part of the tour by its conclusion this summer. We are thrilled that this parade is capturing the hearts and imagination of the British public and is giving a platform to people’s ideas from every corner of the UK and aged from 18 months to 80.”

Carmen Rademaker, Director of charity The Asian Elephant Foundation added: “The impact of this Elephant Parade cannot be under-estimated. On face value, the financial support we will get for our work safeguarding the future of the Asian elephant from the sale of the tour elephants will be most welcome. But this event goes much deeper - the scale of public engagement is doing so much to change the way people think about conservation and this has a much longer lasting impact in helping give the Asian elephant a future. intu’s hosting of the tour is giving Elephant Parade its biggest ever public reach – it will connect with around 30 million people.”