Wild Co-Design
Artist and researcher Aron Weber, alongside a group of creative practitioners, worked with children from across Alexander McLeod Primary School and Abbey Wood Nursery School to co-design an outdoor studio and planting scheme. Inspired by visits to the Barbican and Design Museum, the studio encourages a sense of calmness and a safe, quiet space for children to come together during playtime to draw, read or create. Children developed a sense of ownership of these reimagined spaces and an awareness of the numerous inhabitants of the garden such as pollinators and predators.
Through the series of workshops the children were exposed to a diverse range of makers and practices. With co-production being the central theme tying the activities together, they have learned about community centered design that produces space for the needs of its users, and have become stakeholders in the workshop programme as well as the garden itself. Focusing on learning through play, they developed their initial concepts for the garden through producing performances, short films and zines about their design. Iterating week over week, the children refined and concretised the direction they wanted the workshops to go, learning from practicing artists and place-makers.
This culminated in the production of deck chairs with a custom printed cyanotype fabric that provides a living archive of the children who worked on the project. This responded to the need for more sitting and relaxation space raised by the children, while the curtains on the pavilion create a more secluded and domestic space for reflection. All elements of the project were designed to be easily repairable to encourage continuous care for the garden.
The project aimed at immersing children not only in contemporary art and making practices, but in making them the curators and creators of the outdoor studio and sensory garden, with the aim that this deeper engagement with the space will foster a lasting sense of ownership and care.
Barbican
The children visited the Unravel textile exhibition at the Barbican Centre in preparation for the slowmotion workshop with Wei-Ting Ma.
They learned about domestic practices of care and low cost, low carbon interventions into public spaces.
They reflected on the connection between textiles and communities, which would later reappear as a central element in the design of the garden. The cyanotype lounge chairs and curtains echo the continuous care and engagement with the living environment of the garden.
Wei-Ting Ma
The stop-motion short films were created in a workshop by Wei-Ting Ma, after visiting the Unravel exhibition at the Barbican Centre. The films imagine the garden as a fertile ground for exploration and play, providing a set for the myriad stories of its inhabitants. Reconstructing the garden as a theatre of life, the children produced a blueprint for the final shape of the project. Exploring the endless possibilities and alternative interventions into the space, the children were engaged in the process of thinking through making, echoing practice-led research methods in architectural planning.
Peas Press
Peas Press held a fast-response zine workshop lending their invaluable experience from teaching printmaking at the MA Design Expanded Practice course at Goldsmiths. They delivered a talk on the history of zines and pamphlets, teaching children about the importance of circulating written ephemera and its roots in community-centred practice. The children then learned to create their own zines about the topics important to them, which now live in the garden providing an archive of the people involved in the project. The aim of this workshop was to equip the children with the tools of circulating ideas and capture their thoughts.
The second workshop by Peas Press involved creating prints using LEGOs, which responded to the stop-motion animation films produced by the children, taught them about traditional, low-cost printing techniques. The prints created through the workshop were then the base of the final cyanotype printed fabrics that make the garden more welcoming and domestic.
Jessy Solomon
Jessy shared her practice of biomaterial production and locally-sourced ceramic making. They created Blobsters that watch over and care for the garden, while contributing to the physical memory embedded in the space. They were created from clay made from the garden itself, mixed with clay from various ecological sites around London, teaching the children about material processes and eco-friendly practices. Using materials already present in the garden highlighted both the intrinsic creative potential of the space and made them learn about circular materials and low-carbon practices.
Design Museum
In preparation for the reopening of the garden space, the children visited the Enzo Mari exhibition at the Design Museum, where they learned about design for play and interaction. Getting ready to finish reconstructing the garden, they learned about the complex practices of curating and presenting objects that were made to be used. This prepared them for the relaunch of the space, and situated their involvement in the project as co-producers and co-curators.
