participatory arts – lisafoto's show and tell

Ma Hoose Ma Rules

Working with some of the pupils from Allan’s Primary School, I developed a creative project asks the question, “what if we got to make up our own rules for our own houses?” As the children worked on designs for their houses, they considered how many rooms would it have? What colours they would use for the inside and the outside? How big would the kitchen be? What would they do with their outside space? How would they show some of their rules in the design of their house?

Then they considered why we have rules that help take care of them in the first place. Who keeps us safe in our communities? Why do we have rules at school? How do we use rules to keep ourselves healthy? We used the SHANARRI indicators to help us.

I brought in lots of cardboard that I cut up and made in to houses for which the children painted and then got to decorate in their own styles on the outside.

I love the colours and scale of these little houses and it was imapcful to have them all laid out together.

Music and Photography

I am starting a new project in Stirling tomorrow, working with Brian the musician and a group of care experienced children and young people. It’s been quite a long conversation as Brian and I work out the best way to combine our talents to work collaboratively with this cohort. i was telling Brian about a project I delivered at a primary school in Falkirk which uses music and photography. I thought I would revisit this way of workign and remind myself how many possibilities there are when working collaboratively in photography and other art forms.

Music and art combine to create a narrative image based on the story of Peter and the Wolf (my favourite is the David Bowie narrated version). This image was created using a photographic technique called painting with light. The canvas is made up of single painting with light shapes digitally stitched together in Photoshop. A painting with light image is created with a moving light source such a torch or a glow stick which is captured on a long exposure. By stiching together lots of separate images it allows a whole class to take part in a final piece of work.

I will update this post as Brian and I continue on with the project.

I worked with some pupils from Allan’s Primary School on creating life-size drawings of themselves. The children lay on wallpaper and then drew around one another. They were encouraged to fill the inside of their outline with all the things they like such as foods or colours. The outside of their outline illustrates their local area using photographs taken by the children. The children used pens, crayons and collage to create these life-sized portraits that say something about who they are and where they live.

Brian worked with the children exploring analogue synthesizers and using a Digital Audio Workstation arranged their ideas into a tangible piece of music. Each of them chose the mood of what they wanted to put across sonically and in some cases inspired by the drawings they done with Lisa. This resulted in six separate pieces of music from each participant.