Title
The Life of a House, 2017
Year
2017
Location
Holme St Cuthberts, Cumbria; National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh
Description
Holme St Cuthberts Primary School, near Allonby, west coast of Cumbria and Prism Arts, an inclusive arts organisation, invited me to undertake a project with a group of children. The research question was, 'how can I work alongside these children to explore something creative and profound, so that these children can easily process their feelings, feel more able to take part in school, such as make friends and do well’.
A daily written and visual diary was made of the process, with parents, teachers and myself all adding a part. At the end, we would consult this diary and decide whether the art project had brought us nearer to the answer.
I suggested we look at artist, J M W Turner. His work contains an enormous vocabulary of marks, including those made directly by his hands, rags and other tools and substances, equating to a wide bandwith of expression. His particular approach equated the sea with many feelings, including loss, bravery, and confrontation of the unknown. He was known for favouring research via all the senses, standing out in the elements to record what he saw and felt. All this I hoped would 'transport' the children away from themselves, start to see their coastal neighbourhood differently. We re-enacted several of his methods, and the children made work after him. On a field trip up to Edinburgh, to the National Gallery, we held a three-way conversation: between the children, their work and that of Turner’s (see 3-minute film below).
We also studied the book 'The Pencil' by Allan Ahlberg, a story where each drawn element contains a sense of its own agency, including a pencil who draws his own life, including his friends. The children produced their own book of short stories, which we self-published, hardbound versions for school library and partners, soft-bound versions for the children. In each story, after Turner, each image contained marks made with full intention and meaning, conjuring complex personal worlds and manifested philosophies.
This project was a collective search for forms of affect we could all agree upon and discuss, made possible by the armature of story, and the language of painting. The book contains moments of foolishness, jeopardy, encounters with loneliness and friendship, and the uncanny, transmuted into story and painting.
A daily written and visual diary was made of the process, with parents, teachers and myself all adding a part. At the end, we would consult this diary and decide whether the art project had brought us nearer to the answer.
I suggested we look at artist, J M W Turner. His work contains an enormous vocabulary of marks, including those made directly by his hands, rags and other tools and substances, equating to a wide bandwith of expression. His particular approach equated the sea with many feelings, including loss, bravery, and confrontation of the unknown. He was known for favouring research via all the senses, standing out in the elements to record what he saw and felt. All this I hoped would 'transport' the children away from themselves, start to see their coastal neighbourhood differently. We re-enacted several of his methods, and the children made work after him. On a field trip up to Edinburgh, to the National Gallery, we held a three-way conversation: between the children, their work and that of Turner’s (see 3-minute film below).
We also studied the book 'The Pencil' by Allan Ahlberg, a story where each drawn element contains a sense of its own agency, including a pencil who draws his own life, including his friends. The children produced their own book of short stories, which we self-published, hardbound versions for school library and partners, soft-bound versions for the children. In each story, after Turner, each image contained marks made with full intention and meaning, conjuring complex personal worlds and manifested philosophies.
This project was a collective search for forms of affect we could all agree upon and discuss, made possible by the armature of story, and the language of painting. The book contains moments of foolishness, jeopardy, encounters with loneliness and friendship, and the uncanny, transmuted into story and painting.