Had a great and frantic day yesterday at MK Gallery.
With two 2 hour workshops in which to create ‘Falling Fruit’ – a new edition of the Strained Fruit variety, it was hectic to say the least. Session one hosted over 25 children and produced some lovely work, in a very short and intense time.
Session 2 in the afternoon was, thankfully, a little calmer, and with some materials getting scarce (I can’t believe over 297m of coloured insulation tape were used in such a short space of time) everybody got really inventive with the resources!
Typically I had over-reached with my ambitions for the day and in the melee two planned elements were abandoned. Firstly, as any readers of my Strained Fruit blog will know, the sounds within the Fruitflowers are notoriously unpredicatable and don’t seem to like warm weather – so were refusing to work in the lovely warm gallery space. Secondly, I had planned some new sounds which need to have a bit more movement from the heads of each plant – and had bought speacially an array of interesting elastic with which to suspend them. It was clear from early on that this was not going to happen – I was too tied up with helping in the actually Fruitflower construction to fiddle about with bits of elastic, and secondly the hoop support structure was not wide enough and too flexible to make extra structuring possible.
However these things didn’t really matter at all, and it is yet another lesson to myself (one that I never remember) – not everything needs to be ‘all singing and dancing’ to work.
