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 children at Oak Gardens Primary School have spent the last few weeks planting oaks, foraging at Sayes Court, visiting the South London Gallery, and making an exhibition addressed to the year 2226.

This project follows Talk About Art's work at Grinling Gibbons Primary School, the other school in the Phoenix Federation. That project looked back, asking children what they would take from the past. This one looks forward, asking what they will nurture into the future. Together the two projects form a single conversation across the federation, and both pass through the same place: Sayes Court in Deptford.

Sayes Court was John Evelyn's laboratory for gardening and forestry. It grew many of the plants that appear in Gibbons' carving, and it was Evelyn who introduced Gibbons to Charles II and Christopher Wren after finding his work in a nearby cottage. The garden connects the two projects as it once connected gardener and carver.

The workshops extended beyond the school. At Sayes Court, the children observed and gathered, comparing Evelyn's 1653 plan to the park today and remapping the old design onto the current layout using foraged sticks, leaves and stones. 

The starting point is Joseph Beuys' 7000 Oaks. Each child planted an acorn and considered what it means to plant something they will not see grow to maturity. An oak lives around 200 years. The project asks what life will be like then, and what we can do now to nurture it.

At the South London Gallery, they encountered Ranti Bam's Sacred Groves, placing their own planting within contemporary art practice.

The Time Capsule and its content were presented to the public before it was sealed for 200 years. The students' Letters to the Future were presented on the wall, providing an archive of the thoughts and conversations throughout the project.

The Time Capsule was buried on the last day of the school year.

Materials Produced

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