Summer School, Lakeside Arts Centre

Images from last years Summer School "Inside, Outside". We explored the grounds around Lakeside and created our own magical lands full of strange creatures...
Summer School is for 8-12 year olds and runs for a week each summer at Lakeside Arts Centre.

A year of Gallery Art Group, Lakeside

A selection of images from the last year at Gallery Art Group, a weekly group for 11-13 year olds at Lakeside Arts Centre.
We use the Galleries exhibition as a starting point for work, last year we looked at

Inge Tong and painted portraits based on old photographs
Lowry and made sketchbooks and drew from life
Burra, during which we made backdrops, sets and costumes
An Archive exhibition of Manifestos, which we used to create our own Gallery Art group moto
and Jo Berry, where we made transparent collages which we then lit.

This year we have just started looking at Laura Knight and painting outdoors....

Story Telling Wall. The Grand Opening.

It's all finished and to celebrate we invited years 3 and 4 to come and see the wall and be shown by the year 5's how to use it to tell stories.

Firstly though we had to cut the ribbon and declare it open...

Year 5 then shared stories they had made using the characters, places, events and genres from the word tree.

We had a horror story involving a hunter at a party and then a play about Harry Potter having dance lessons in a school.

The wall was then open for the school to use during lunchtime and the story telling began.

Afterward the class thought of words to describe the wall and the project they said,
"Awesome, colourful, amazing, brilliant, beautiful' and that they felt " Proud, relieved, astonished, epic".

Oakham Mural- more progress

More progress on the Oakham mural.

Tomorrow is the grand opening. We have a few things to finish off including adding all our words to turn the mural into a storytelling wall.

Storytelling Mural, starting to paint

On wednesday I was very pleased to see the sunshine out as it was my first session at High Oakham Primary painting their storytelling mural with class 5.

The first group had the exciting task of helping me clean the wall. They did a very good job, getting rid of a lot of dirt and dust and giving us a good surface to paint on.

The plan for the day was to paint the background for the first two sections of the wall, the story tree wall and the blackboard wall. So the groups were painting big expanses in one or two colours.

The background is pretty much done, just a bit of touching up to do and then next week we'll be adding some details.

Storytelling Mural- planning and design

I'm currently working at High Oakham Primary school in Mansfield on a project with the Mighty Creatives. The school has asked if I could transform a wall in the playground into something which encourages storytelling during playtime.

I meet with the group of year 5's and came up with a plan...

It turns out that I had meet the same group 3 years ago when they were in year 2 and worked with them as part of a literacy day based around the book "Where the wild things are", where the group made words trees.

We decided to build on this idea and came up with the plan to paint a word tree on to the school wall. On the word tree would be words choosen by the class that fell into four categories, characters, settings, a happening and a genre. These would be the starting point for story telling. On the wall we would also have a blackboard to write stories and a backdrop for acting stories out in front off.

We were all happy with the idea so the next step was to get designing.

We started getting our imaginations working by thinking of ways to change our fingerprints into pictures.

We then went out and looked at the wall and started drawing designs for each section of the Mural.

I then went away and drew the ideas into a plan

next week we start painting.

Goodbye to gravity

I've just finished working on a project with The Mighty Creatives at Bentinck Primary School. I worked with year 1's and 2's on a space themed project alongside practitioner David Matthews.

The idea was to use the term's topic of Space as a starting point to develop the groups imagination and communication. The group decided on the direction for the project with year 2 taking on the role of the astronuts and year 1 becoming the aliens. David created a theatrical space adventure with the group in which they travelled to another planet, went on a space walk and encountered an alien garden. I made props and costumes with the group with the results being shown to parents and teachers. I had a great time with the school, the children were very lively and enthusiastic through out the project. I also got to spent a good amount of time making a giant silver rocket and drawing aliens which is never a bad thing!

A space backdrop drawn collaboratively by year 2

The backdrop takes shape...

Designs for the Alien masks...

and the completed ones...

The rocket in progress.

Illuminate, Planning the Cultural Catwalk and paper outfits

As part of our funding bid we came up with the idea of running a cultural catwalk. The idea was that this would show how different cultures had influenced contemporary fashion. We also liked the idea of running practical workshops to create clothing inspired by the collection. The cultural catwalk will be part of our closing event in september.

In the busyiness of planning and designing our exhibition we hadn't given this part of the project much thought so we decided to spend some time over half term coming up with ideas about what it might be and how it might work.

As we've been doing lots of planning I thought it would be a good chance to get creative, so the first task was to use the collection as inspiration for creating some contemporary outfits.

looking at images of the clothing on display the group came up with words to discribe their style and fit.

The group came up with words such as embelished, embroderied, details, bulky construction, pleats, colourful and symbols.

We then split into two teams, with each team pulling two words from a bag. One was a word about style or fit the other a motif from the clothing. The first team got the words "bats" and "layers" and the second team had "pleats" and "birds". Their challenge was to create a paper outfit using these words as a basis.


Here are the end results

"Bats" and "layers" became a dress with batwing sleeves..

"Birds" and "pleats" turned into this dress, with a feather inspired collar.

The next thing was to think about what we would like to do for our cultural catwalk event.
The group decided they would like to work with an artist or designer to create contemporary clothing inspired by the collection. They wanted to have a couple of sessions with the designer where they were "trained" up and then were able to assist the designer delivering sessions to different community groups. The groups would create outfits to show at the Cultural catwalk.
We would offer paper outfit workshops as part of the end event for people to take part in, but the group felt that paper outfits might not last for very long so wouldn't work for the main catwalk designs.
The group liked pulling out the words as a basis for their design and thought the process they had gone through today would work well as a workshop to offer to others.

So a few more decisions made, the next task is to make it happen...

Unravelled Install at Nottingham Castle

I lead the Illuminate group at Nottingham Museums and Galleries (16-24 year olds) who have been working on this project since September. Curating, designing and marketing our exhibition "Unravelled", uncovering the stories behind the Museums collection of Chinese Silk.
The exhibition is now open until Sept 16th.

Here's the link to our timelapse film of our install...

and here's a bit of a snapshot of the install process.

Week one
Painting our mural and teal wall...

Planning where each object will be mounted on the wall.

and dry mounting all the cases.

Week two
The cases are cleaned and the objects carefully put in them and placed onto the wall.

The panels and Vinyls go up.

And the group work on the finishing touches.

Lakeside-Gallery Art Group

Some artwork by the Gallery Art Group inspired by the current exhibition by Jo Berry "Hijacking Natural Systems". We used drawings from the exhibition to create our own mini light boxes, cutting out shapes from lighting gels and arranging them into overlapping patterns.