• Community Art,  Schools Projects

    A Finished Piece for Schools

    As previously posted, I’ve been working with schools over the last few weeks, all primary, with a mix of age groups, to produce some ‘fossil walls’.

    The children have made the work themselves, and I have thoroughly enjoyed it.  Now in the final stages of finishing off the artworks where necessary, mounting, etc.

    St Thomas is a Catholic school and they wanted to do words of faith, so we made a piece for their reception area, and a second, singular piece that they would like to present as a gift to another school that visited them shortly before I did my workshop

    All the words we used, as well as the objects, were selected by the year sixes – here’s the finished pieces, ready for hanging.

    Fossil Wall for St Thomas

    St Thoma's gift piece

  • General

    Fossil Walls…

    For the last six weeks, I’ve been working in various primary schools in the local area.

    We’ve been making ‘fossil walls’ – a process that I happened upon almost accidentally that gave some rather surprising and lovely results – modern day (or any) objects, cast, and because of the sand used in the process, I thought they looked like fossils.

    Each school chose their own designs and ideas.  Some of the schools I went into chose to do individual blocks, where the children brought in items that were important or significant to them; others wanted to leave a ‘legacy’ for other children coming up through the years with their words of wisdom (quite interesting choices from 10 year olds!).  We also have done some plaques on based on areas of the curriculum, as well as designs based on school logos and mottos.

    In all schools, the children actually got very involved with the making – from deciding what went into each design, to piling sand into containers and finding objects to insert.  There’s some of the more technical and Health and Safety stuff I’ve had to do myself of course, but I’ve tried to let the children participate as much as possible – this is their work.  Oh, and in most schools, I’ve had some lovely able helpers at the end of each day to tidy up.

    It’s been great fun, if hard work; the children have been a delight with their wit, intelligence, creative thinking, helpfulness and politeness.

    Here’s a couple of examples below.   I am looking forward to them all being dried out enough to seal and getting them installed to decorate all the school spaces (even if that’s more work for me!)

    Curriculum and classroom names
    Einstein said…
    Inspired by the school logo
    What subject?
    Words of Wisdom from Year 6