The Way Things Go
Merton Park After-School Art Club (Spring Term Project)
Playing Seriously
In our first Art Club session back at Merton Park Primary School, after the Christmas holidays, we began to explore ideas around building, structures and machinery.
I have been interested the idea of ‘serious play’ for a while in the work that I do; that is playing with ideas or materials with a purpose. Many others who deal with creativity in education would share this notion in a world increasingly pressurising children to achieve results and hit targets in a standardised way. If you are interested in this you may want to follow the thread through an article I recently wrote for the NSEAD (National Society for Education in Art and Design) The Seriousness of Play.
But I digress…
We began our session with a drawing exercise based on the game Chinese Whispers.
Each child was given an object small enough to fit in the palm of their hand, and was asked to draw in secret on a small square of paper. Looking at every mark, line and shape they saw. We used things from my tool box this week to fit in the idea of machines. We could draw from every angle, with pen and pencil. This made us look very closely and concentrate hard.
We then collected the objects and sat in a circle. We passed our drawing around and copied our neighbours, exactly as we saw it.
This was harder we thought as we didn’t have the original object to look at, but it was faster to do. We carried on passing drawings until we had four drawings each. We then tried to guess which object we had. It wasn’t always obvious.
Lastly we matched all the drawings to their original object and talked about how the drawings changed as they were passed on. The drawing of the drawing of the drawing of the object!
We then watched a film of two artists, Fischili and Weiss who made a work called ‘The way things go’.
We then selected four items from a table full of junk objects. We played with them and added to them to make precarious structures, that would just stand still, and look interesting. There was lots of bangs and clatters as we experimented.
When we were happy we made a large charcoal drawing of our structure.
Then photographed it with a white sheet as a backdrop.
We talked about what we found difficult and what we liked about each sculpture:
we liked the sandwich made by the bottle and its lid!
we liked the man with the top hat
we also liked the way objects were layered inside each other.
We decided we would like to try and make them move next week!
I would like to thank Henry Ward, AccessArt and Welling School’s publication AE5 for sharing the ideas that helped in the development of this session.
The Way Things Go - Part 1
Continuing from last weeks session, when we started to think about structures and moving machines, we made some drawings of car parts and tools. (I had spent a surprisingly enjoyable half hour rummaging around in a car junk yard and found some fabulous things to draw.) The objects helped us look at texture shape and think about how things go together and make things move.
We started off by making quick 5-minute sketches with graphite, pencil, compressed charcoal and pen.
The car parts helped us generate some lovely patterns. We tried combining media.
In a more detailed drawing, using graded pencils, we created a layered background with coloured paper to help us think about composition. It made our drawings more varied and interesting. A variety of pencils helped us think about the different qualities of line.
It was a very peaceful and productive session. Some new machines were starting to emerge…
The Way Things Go - Part 2
Following on from our first session in this project where we played with purpose, using objects to build stable but precarious structures, we now experimented with making these structures move.
The simple task of making balls move, through a chain of events, across a table kept us challenged for nearly an hour and a half!
We watched the film by artists Peter Fichili and David Weiss, called ‘The Way Things Go’, for the second time, and thought about the different actions that made the objects move. Sliding, catapulting, balancing, falling, nudging.
First we worked in small groups to create a simple chain of movements.
Click below to see the video clips.
Then we worked as a team, joining our ideas together to make the balls move across the table. It’s harder than it looks! We tested actions, refined ideas, negotiated and finally we came up with this!
Click below to see the final group scene video clip.
Tuttle and Texture
We have been looking at tools, machines and parts of old cars. We made some drawings and looked at the variety of shapes and textures.
This week we began to imagine other ways of creating texture. We looked at Richard Tuttle’s work, who has recently had an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery and Tate Modern. We looked at the variety of materials used in his work. What can you see here?
We then experimented with printing using different materials to see what marks we could make. Wire, bubble wrap, sandpaper, fabric, card, shoelaces, foam, sponge, velcro, foil…
We then looked again at the car parts and created a printing plate using the textures we liked.
We used circles of thick grey-board to experiment.
We laid out our design before sticking it down.
These were our finished plates. We will try to print with them next time
Beautiful Collographs
This week, we learnt to make a collograph print. We refined our plates made last week, that were based on our drawings of rusty old car parts.
We then mixed some acrylic paint to the right consistency and applied it to our plate.
We made our paper wet using a sponge so the paper was pliable and flexible. Then we made a sandwich with felt on the bottom, our painted plate in the middle, with the wet paper and another sheet of dry paper on top. We then pressed down all over our plate getting our fingers into all of the grooves.
Some beautiful prints were revealed showing traces of textures from the materials we used.
We experimented with different papers and colours and different amounts of water and paint consistency.
We tried mixing colours as we reused our plates.
The results were quite beautiful. we will experiment with different shapes next time to make a giant printed machine that we all make a part of and join together.
Ingenious Inventions
The last two weeks we have been focusing on making our own invention to make into a large scale collograph printed work. This week we began by looking back at our initial drawings of machine parts and selecting shapes to work with. Then, in quick drawings, we investigated how shapes could fit together.
We then used the shapes to make a drawing of an imaginary machine. We gave it a name and thought about how it could work and what it would do.
We explained its features to each other. We then took one or two parts of the machine to make bigger and cut them into templates. We experimented on a larger scale with how the pieces could fit together to make new machines.
The pieces were transferred onto thick card in order to make a collograph printing plate, like the one we experimented with a few weeks ago.
This week we added textures to our new collograph plates. We used earlier experiments to decide what worked and what we needed to create an interesting machine part.
When our plates were finished we played a game to explore different ways our machine parts could fit together.
There were many satisfying combinations.
We look forward to printing with these plates and making them into a giant new invention – who knows what it will do?
These made lovely prints using metallic paints. Ready to make our giant new machine now!
Magnificent Machines
To conclude our project The Way things Go, we collaborated to make several giant collograph printed works.
We began by looking at the work of artists Fichilli and Weiss in two sessions where we investigated The Way Things Go and Playing Seriously. We then went on to look at machine parts and experimented with texture, examining the work of Richard Tuttle. Each final individual print was made using the collograph technique that we learnt earlier in the term.
We worked in groups to try different combinations, discussing new machine ideas as we went.
Some became figurative, while others linked in different purposeful ways. Some were just decorative, exploring repetition and pattern, but we looked how the shapes could interlock, like the original machines parts we had observed in our drawings.
As it was our last session of the term, we then worked as a team to display our work for our parents to see.
We arranged our original drawings - the machines that inspired us, our collograph plates, and the final group works. It’s a shame we didn’t have time to show the films we made of our moving sculptures at the start of the project.
Mrs Gooderick our head teacher came to look! She was very impressed!
[Update:]
We entered our work into the Generation Art exhibition and it has been selected to be in a real life exhibition at Turner Contemporary (an art gallery in Margate) in June.
Here is the email I got!
Generation ART 2 D artwork submissions
Thank you for submitting artworks to Generation ART. Your submission was among 200 entries from across the country shown to a selection panel of art curators, educators, artists and young people. The panel were extremely impressed by the quality and variety of artworks submitted, as well as the imaginative range of themes, ideas and media. It was not an easy task for the selection panel to choose the final works to be included for the touring exhibition and online resource.
We are delighted to tell you that your submitted artwork: The Way Things Go (Group Work) has been selected for inclusion in the Generation ART touring exhibition. It will also feature in the Generation ART digital gallery and resource.
We are SO Proud of you all!
Children’s Art School goes to Margate - Generation ART: Young Artists on Tour
The launch event was on Saturday 20th June, at the Clore Learning Studio, Turner Contemporary, Margate. The exhibition is on show there until 6th September when it will go on tour. It’s well with a visit…
Our work (below) was selected to be part of this national touring exhibition of children’s art.
“The Way Things Go is a collaborative art work made by children aged 7-9 at Merton Park Primary School’s after school art club, led by Annabel Johnson (Children’s Art School Director”
This exhibition shows the “Value of making art… Each work was selected because of it’s outstanding quality… a hard choice”
Karen Eslea, Head of Learning and Visitor Experience, Turner Contemporary
Generation ART: Young Artists on Tour, engage’s exhibition of children and young peoples artwork opened in June at Turner Contemporary with 40 works by 4-18 year olds from across England. Artworks were selected through open submission and include film, ceramics, print, painting and drawing They were created by young artists at school, home, in arts and community settings and in many cases were inspired by art and artists. Young people in Margate will work with an artist creating art work to be shown at Turner Contemporary inspired by the Grayson Perry exhibition currently on display at the gallery. This project will demonstrate the continuum between young artists work and that by professional practitioners.
The work will tour from Turner Contemporary to the New Walk Museum and Art Gallery and Soft Touch Arts, Leicester and Quay Arts on the Isle of Wight.
“Each show will feel different with young people getting involved at every stage and artists making new work in response to it”
~ Jane Sillis, Director, engage
The exhibition was based on the idea that more children should have the opportunity to exhibit their work and the opportunity to visit a gallery. It’s about “raising standards and improving lives, and showing to parents and children what is possible…they will be enriched by seeing it.”
This exhibition shows “the dreamland arts education you would want all children to have”
~ Ian Middleton HMI, National lead for Art, Craft and Design, Ofsted
“The exhibition shows work of quality with a range of references and will raise expectations of what is possible for other children. It is an enormous event.”
~ Dr Peter Gregory, Senior Lecturer in Education (Creative Arts), Canterbury Christchurch University