Common Ground 2026
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.