I set up Room for Imagination (an artists collective) a couple of years ago to pool skills with other creatives in order to take on commisions and create installations and workshops at various festivals. At Small World Spring Festival this year, we ran bird making and print making workshops in the childrens area, in a yurt which became our literal ‘Room for Imagination.’
My aim during this festival was to encourage children and adults to help us fill the yurt with birds, so it became a temporary aviary. The birds would then disperse or ‘fly’ to new homes once the festival had ended.
I wanted to create an environment where both adults and children were creatively stimulated; where people had a choice about how they approached the project, yet felt they contributed to the space as a whole.
We had whole families getting involved; working alongside each other at different levels; some people that were confident about their abilities and experimented widely with the materials available, others that were keen to start off with templates and gradually made the work their own by adapting the design or making choices about colour and pattern. It was really encouraging to find that some people kept returning to take on a new challenge; that ideas were shared and embellished as the space grew.
My intention was also to use these workshops as a testing space for a schools project that I have been mulling over. The experience was helpful in identifying how best to introduce the project, how to overcome some of the difficulties in making and how to promote independent and exciting responces across a whole spectrum of abilities, characters and ages.
