While next year’s Olympics will give talented sportsmen and women a chance to shine, during the past twelve months artistically-minded young people have been getting stuck into the 2012 experience by taking part in the Cultural Olympiad, writes Will Gore.

More than 20 London museums and arts organisations, across 17 boroughs, have taken part in a range of projects inspired by the title, Stories of the World, including Orleans House Gallery and the Richmond Arts Service.

Eighty young people from the borough of Richmond have spent a year working alongside professional artists at Orleans House Gallery to create an exhibition, entitled Journeys, which opened at the Twickenham venue last week.

Miranda Stearn, one of the exhibition’s curators, says the Stories of the World project allows young people “to get involved with museum collections and play an active part in interpreting them”.

Investigating the theme of ‘journeys’, the participants at Orleans House Gallery took inspiration from the life and travels of the Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton having got up close to many of the artefacts, images and documents held in the borough’s Burton Collection.

The participants have also looked to the work of internationally-renowned contemporary artists, such as Piyali Ghosh, Maha Malluh and Gerard Quenum, in helping them come up with their pieces for the exhibition.

For example, they were shown a necklace from Benin made from human bone, taken from the Burton Collection, and the contemporary sculpture of Benin artist Quenum, to help them to come up with sculptures of their own.

As well as sculptures, there are also paintings, films and animations on display and they take their place in the exhibition alongside the contemporary artworks and the artefacts from the Burton collection that inspired them.

Stearn says: “The Burton collection was a great starting point for us to start thinking about the theme of journeys. We wanted the young people to take inspiration from Burton’s stories and objects that come from all over the world and it was easy to get them excited about his adventures.

“But we didn’t want the participants to only view the countries Burton visited from his perspective. We also wanted them to see the world from a broader standpoint and so we did that by engaging in the contemporary art practice from those different countries.”

Journeys – Stories of the World, Orleans House Gallery, Twickenham, until May 22, richmond.gov.uk home/leisure_and_culture