things to do to make your day better as you walk past these hoardings

Two stories that demonstrate the freewheeling nature of a child’s imagination . . .

Working with the children a week ago to devise texts for the hoarding, I met a boy I had not met before.

I gave him some paper and pens and he returned with a full page of writing – his story – which was impossible to read or make sense of. So I asked him to read it to me, his finger pointing to each word he had written – a story about trains.

He held on to the paper and during the day read his story to different play workers.

It turned out that each time he did so, the story was a new one, each completely different. As he pointed to each word, a new scenario was being created.

When I told Frances at South London Gallery about this, she told me of the girl who had written and illustrated a story on large sheets of paper pinned to a long fence. Frances had congratulated the girl on her story, and the girl, like the boy, told Frances her story, or rather a new story to the one she had told me, this too changing to a completely different one.

The hoarding that I am working on is part of Drawn Together – walls created in collaboration – and forms part of a series of on-going education projects at the South London Gallery, which will be included in the exhibition (with the theme of walls) that launches the gallery’s expanded building in late June.

For Drawn Together artists have worked collaboratively with local residents, children and young people, and with the education team itself to create works on walls, both on and offsite.

If Wishes Were Birds by Orly Orbach & Joanna Brinton and the residents of Sceaux Gardens is situated on a wall around a block of flats which recently was the site of a tragic fire in which six people died. Children and residents have created a series of ‘wishes’ which touch on this event and the future of their estate.

Matthew Shaw, current artist in residence at Sceaux Gardens has explored with children on the estate how children play with different types of materials, and how this might relate to contemporary art practice, in a work titled Ball Walls.

Here is a picture of the Stanley Spencer with the paint trolley that he used to wheel his painting equipment in and around Cookham.

And Ladies and Gentlemen . . . here is a picture of my paint trolley that I am wheeling around Camberwell and Kennington.

A selection of stories written by the children, which I collected during a previous residency are being published as the June edition of A3 Hand Drawn and Quartered, the monthly poster style publication that I produce.

The South London Gallery are funding a larger print run so that children and staff at the playground will receive copies, the gallery bookshop can stock copies, and I can increase the number of copies given to the usual outlets that stock the publication.

Putting together the black publication I hadn’t realised – even though it is obvious now – that the white text on the black page style of the magazine resembled the chalk drawings made by the children on the wall I painted black at the playground, that i was producing a minature version of the wall.

Here are some images of the wall at the playground.

To act as a focus for collecting writing from the children, I put up sheets of paper on the fences around the garden and a couple of the ‘rides’ at the playground. By the end of the day these were all filled with text and drawings.

Some children drew, and from that we worked out an action that others could follow, other children wrote an action then made a drawing to go with that.

Children who are not verbal, and who do not use either a signing or picture system to communicate, were included by asking the play worker who knew the child best to tell me an action or game that the child liked, and that was used as the basis for an instruction.

For the young man particularly fond of playing with a piece of rope, his instruction was ~ Swing On A Rope.

One of the play workers suggested that I could include some of the PECS communication signs that are used at the playground on the hoarding, and another play worker suggested writing some of the text in Yoruba and Potuguese as children at the playground also speak these languages. This got me thinking about including some of the childrens’ drawings on the hoarding, something I hadn’t considered before.

The paper gradually filled up during the day, and the sheets of blank paper inspired several children to write stories.

One was about an egg that got woken up by an erupting volcano and was swallowed by a monster but lay safe and warm in the mouth of the monster, where it fell asleep.

I now have ideas from the children for actions / instructions to write up on the hoarding.

A few here:

Do hopscotch and skipping and smile as you do it ~ Crystal

Take it easy, don’t be grumpy at work, take the time to listen, walk in a funky way ~ Kieran

Move like a ninja ~ Bob

Pop your collar up ~ Jordan

Give someone a flower ~ Zeena