TWO art exhibitions based on very different themes open at a Bradford gallery today.

Home is an collection of artwork by teenage girls that has been inspired by the lives and works of the Bronte sisters.

And Parity Like It's 2069 uses art to address the pay gap between men and women.

Both of the exhibitions will launch at a special event at South Square Gallery in Thornton tonight, and run until December 18.

Earlier this year the gallery received a grant of £11,700 from the Heritage Lottery Fund to research the life of Charlotte Bronte and her family. It was to mark the 200th birthday of the Jane Eyre author, who was born in Thornton.

A group of girls from Beckfoot Thornton School, known as the Young Roots, researched the history of the Bronte family and their links to their home village, and worked with artists to find different ways of expressing their legacy.

The research included numerous trips to the Bronte Parsonage in Haworth, where the sisters spent much of their life, and their birthplace.

The result is a collection of work in various different media, from film, to prints to paintings, each produced by a different girl.

Talking about working with the artists, Amy Cresswell said: "All the different artists took different approaches and used different styles. We were experimenting with styles we wouldn't normally think of."

Laraib Mahmood said: "We learned a lot about the Brontes we didn't know before."

The girls are using the project to work towards an Arts Award qualification.

Parity Like Its 2069 is an exhibition in response to a recent survey that found that if current trends continue, women will not earn the same wage on average as men until that date.

Female artists were asked to take this idea and produce a piece of work that reflected that worldwide pay gap, and pieces in the exhibition include a short animation, sculptures and fabric pieces.

November 10 is Equal Pay Day - from that day women essentially work for free as on average men will have earned by that point in the year what a woman earns in an entire year.

Alice Withers, who put the exhibition together, said: "We asked the artists to think about the idea of equal pay and highlight it in a piece.

"All of them created work specifically for the exhibition and respond to these statistics."

One of the pieces is an 86 pence coin by Lisa Davies - highlighting how much less women earn, that visitors to the gallery can make rubbings of.

Emma Hardaker's fabric hanging is based on the theme of transparency. She said: "Equality is all about transparency when it comes to what people earn. I asked friends and family to give me their pay slips and I used a lot of the symbols and figures from them."

Bobbie Rae produced a clay sculpture of unbalanced scales. She said: "It is made of clay, part is glazed and part is unglazed. It represents the unbalanced nature of pay. It is not perfectly made which represents the imperfection of the pay system."

Both exhibitions open tonight at an event beginning at 5pm and ending at 9pm. It will feature workshops, music, a performance from the Bradford Women's Singers and food and drink.

Visitors will be able to make items to go in their own "party bag" ready to celebrate for when there is equal pay.

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