With Art Branches and Suffolk Family Carers
A day out on RSPB Minsmere for Suffolk Family Carers exploring the heath through art and ecology activities.
Journeys
Art After School: Flow
The Curious Cabinet Day 1: a site responsive artwork to encourage future stories and art-making
Dear Class,
You are invited to visit the Curious Cabinet. The cabinet has been delivered to your school for your inspection, deliberation, fascination and to make you curious too.
Go and examine the weird and wonderful objects within, consider the things that might live there, look for ways in, look for ways out, look for any magic you might be the only one to see. Use your wildest imagination.
Then, shut your eyes and invent what you would like to be there…
Write to me, describing what you are thinking of…
Is it a creature? Is it a place? Is it an adventure?
Please tell me what only YOU know about what there may be in my cabinet.
Roll up your paper, tie it carefully, and deliver it to the cabinet to inspire someone else another day.
With my thanks for your help,
The Keeper of the Cabinet Continue reading
Talking Funny
I’ve been thinking a lot about words and communication recently. Firstly working with learning disabled students at the excellent Rowan Humberstone arts centre in Cambridge. This was part of Kettles Yard’s Open House programme, this season exploring radio and capturing overlooked voices. Continue reading
Memory zines with Year 6 leavers
An end of primary school treat for a class that loves art. The etching press came to school for the first time and we worked with the students to make memory zines of their time at the school: everything from school dinners to who kissed who. Continue reading
Into the Somewhere
Working with theatre maker Dominic Biddle
Into the Somewhere started out as a research project investigating innovative ways to bring together performance and visual art. It also looked to make an art encounter relevant to the thoughts and concerns of primary school children. Continue reading
Art in the Park, Outdoor Studio
First of six art sessions with families in Nowton Park, exploring and engaging with a woodland copse through art making. Continue reading
After school art: investigating the space
Back to Art Club today with quite large group and an expanded workspace.
This term I want to offer activities that encourage the children to always be looking with the eyes of the artist, exploring, collecting and documenting what they see. I have decided to use the art club activity room as the place to explore and over the next four weeks we will try and look at it with fresh eyes, perhaps discover things we haven’t noticed before and make some art that will share our findings with other users of the room.
Today we started with sketchbooks. The children closed their eyes then opened them, looked around and sketched the first few things they saw that they felt they hadn’t seen before. We tried lying on our backs to get a new angle on the space.
Next each child selected a shape from the table and explored the room, recording in their sketchbook the places where they found the shape in the environment. I’ve posted the sketchbook entries of a couple of the circle collectors.
Finally we explored the room again this time using viewfinders. We’d looked at how using the viewfinder was quite similar to using an ipad to capture an image. The children used the viewfinders to focus on particular areas of interest to them and to decide what to include in their drawings. They sketched in charcoal on white and in chalk on black. Here are some of the drawings.
After school art: journeys to school
The end of our ‘journeys to school’ project. This week the children thought about the surfaces they travel across on the way to school then created textured footprints to convey the feel and look of roads, paths, fields and mud. They then carried on experimenting with animal footprints.
I’d intended to work with them creating a huge map of their journeys to school using all the artwork we’d created in this project. In reality, there was so much to explore with the travel textures that we ended up exhibiting all the artwork on the classroom floor at the end of the session.
I feel that during this project the children have closely observed and thought about their journeys sometimes using them as a start of a fantastical narrative. At the end of this session the children invited their parents to view their art and talked them through their personal view of the daily school run.
