Common Ground

Grinling Gibbons Primary School

Students at Grinling Gibbons Primary School spent several weeks exploring the work of Deptford's most famous woodcarver, moving from looking and researching to making and curating their own exhibition. The project grounded itself both physically in Deptford and in the logic of Gibbons' practice, asking children to follow the same process of observation, translation and making that runs through his work.

The children visited the V&A, where a significant collection of Gibbons' work is held, to look closely at his carving and understand it as a technique. Gibbons removed material to leave an image: the same logic as lino printing, the same logic as the children's own making to come. The visit also traced the connections between Gibbons and Deptford, situating his work within a local history the children could claim as their own.

Back in the classroom, the children made lino prints of their favourite places and plants across the borough. The workshop drew a direct line to Gibbons' practice of carving local flora, translating that impulse into a technique accessible at their scale. Material is removed, and what remains makes the image.

The children made clay flowers and used them to produce cyanotype prints in preparation for the exhibition. The process introduced a different relationship between making and image-making, using light and material together to fix their observations onto paper.

The prints were hung from metal structures in the school hall, a decision that tied back to how Gibbons' work was always made in response to architecture, complementing and activating the surfaces around it. The children co-curated the exhibition themselves, making spatial decisions about what to show and where, developing an attentiveness to the relationship between object and environment that sits at the heart of Gibbons' practice.

Oak Gardens Primary School

The second phase of Common Ground, at Oak Gardens Primary School, the federation's other site, looked forward. It linked Deptford's natural environments with Joseph Beuys' 7000 Oaks.
 

Sayes Court, a local park, was the starting point. The garden was John Evelyn's laboratory for gardening and forestry. It held many of the plants and foliage that inspired Gibbons, and Evelyn introduced Gibbons to Charles II and Christopher Wren after finding his work in a nearby cottage. Following Evelyn's work, the project was centred on growth, nature and time. Through 7000 Oaks and Wheatfield, children learned about Deptford's history and engaged with gardening as art practice.

Oak trees had a typical lifespan of 200 years. Where the Grinling Gibbons project had asked children what they would take from the past, the Oak Gardens project had asked what they would nurture into the future. After having been introduced to Beuys and land art, the children re-enacted 7000 Oaks by planting their own oak trees. This intervention had grounded the rest of the activities.

It asked children to look 200 years ahead: what would life be like, and what could we do to nurture that future? We visited Sayes Court and Sacred Groves by Ranti Bam at the South London Gallery. At Sayes Court, the children looked at what it was like to nurture a space for 400 years. At the South London Gallery, they learned about art practices that connected the earth to making. After the visits, we developed our plan for the future: a time capsule containing letters to 2226, a collective blackboard discussion on the future we wanted to see, and documentation of our intervention at Sayes Court using foraged materials and ephemeral installations.

Materials Produced

Project Descriptions: Grinling Gibbons Primary School / Oak Gardens Primary School