Take art as a fun way to play
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WE have been keeping ourselves busy through the sizzle and the items in our collection have been bearing the heat admirably.
There are some lovely activities which may help you beat the heat during the rest of the summer.
The theme is play with all our family and children’s events rooted within this exploratory, freeing concept.
Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays are our chosen days for hosting family activities with an art theme.
Wednesdays will be our usual craft activity experience and you are encouraged to drop in and see which processes we are learning each week.
Past examples are printmaking, clay model making, casting, pom-pom making and last week our guests created an incredible variety of colourful spoon people to brighten up our workshop space.
It’s always worth popping in for a chat if you’d like to know more, and tickets are £3 on the door for ages three and up.
Mondays and Fridays are reserved for special advance-booked sessions for smaller groups with a more defined theme and focus.
The Art of Shadows kicked off the summer programme, an atmospheric exercise with silhouettes, puppets, ink and paper.
Our bright ground floor workshop became a moody, studio-lit shadow landscape, full of narrative and laughter from our enthusiastic artists and their parents.
Once our groups had finished splatting and dripping their projected shadows onto the walls in black ink, it was time to open the shutters, mop the floors and prepare for the next event.
The Art of Randomness was a two-hour session of messy art play, underpinned by a process of randomisation and numbers which loosely dictate the actions of the participants.
The whole floor became a canvas and our artists were encouraged to move and draw towards different numbers hung up around the edges of the room.
As a creative session, this one had the high-energy feel of a game of dodgeball and through the painted feet and smeared charcoal some beautiful acts of creativity were seen.
After much cleaning of feet, we bid our gleeful creators goodbye and applied the mop and bucket.
Until August 24 (11am-1pm), Blindfold Art will be an exploration of proprioception – one of the main senses of our bodies and the ability to feel and know the position and movement of our limbs.
We will be incorporating this concept into a fun session where we draw and paint from memory, narratives and various sorts of audio stimuli – without the use of our eyes.
As with all of our events, we conduct these creative exercises in a safe, supportive environment, so no participant will be forced to keep their comfortable sleep masks on.
The inspiration, sense of fun and play, resiliency and the joy of beneficial artistic mistakes is what we want to instil in our young artists.
Hopefully they will take away a sense of creative freedom or process from their experiences.
Such is the nature of play and the importance of its part in everyone’s life and development.
Moving beyond the summer, we hope to continue the theme of play and enthrall visitors with the return of our Museum by Torchlight sessions.
These were invigorating events to run and we look forward to weaving those dark narratives again, handing out the torches as our young guests slip into the darkness of the museum.