So here are some more images of the exhibition, I aimed to introduce the children to a range of simple sculptural ideas and processes throughout the residency with an emphasis placed strongly on an inventive and fun use of form, colour, scale, texture and space among other things and the children were encouraged to be as imaginative with the materials as they could be.
The initial part of the residency was focused on maquette making activity, a maquette being a model for a larger piece of sculpture. This idea was pushed and played about with, the children not actually making small models to be directly scaled up as a final piece but in fact have fun using ideas and materials to make prototypes that may never be realised in a main piece. With this in mind the children had no pressure to produce specific outcomes during this period, and the resulting Maquettes show this ease with which they were simply allowed to make things
The residency culminated in the Shoe Project, an idea that came from all this initial maquette making activity. Shoes have been used as armatures forming the inside of each individual piece. The result is one large sculptural work made up of 80 or so individual pieces that can be displayed in various ways; the work has everything to do with ways of transforming a discarded ordinary object by simply covering it with something else and how this act seems to magically give those commonplace objects a new life.
Its been hard work and at times quite stressfull working with around 135 kids but its been immensly usefull for me in terms of invigorating my own practice, the children have opend my eyes to a whole lot of things!
