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Naomi Hicks
When I first heard about the KEEPS exhibition, I was really keen to get involved as it sounded like such a dynamic and interesting project, and I knew just the place to try it out. From the UK myself, I decided to run the project at a thriving small village school, Ogbourne St George C of E Primary School in Wiltshire, and having visited it before, I knew the pupils, their caring and positive attitude, and their enthusiasm for art! The school is set in a very picturesque village in an area of outstanding natural beauty among the Marlborough Downs, is a key part of the local community, and has around 80 pupils, coming mostly from the local village but also the surrounding hamlets and villages out of the school’s catchment area. The children are predominantly white and English is the first language for all of the children there. To give you an idea of the socio-economic background of the area, less than 0.1% of the children claim free school meals and the area is generally one of low unemployment. Approximately a quarter of the pupils come from farming communities but a significant number of parents commute up to London or along the M4 corridor. I felt that the school would not only be very enthusiastic about the project (which they were!) but would provide a really interesting contrast to the projects we were running both in London, within the UK, and also overseas.
On the day of the project, I arrived at the school nice and early to get everything set up, which was just as well, as being a small school it was going to be entertaining trying to fit ten children and their canvases into one corner of the classroom! Once all the children had arrived, I took the year two’s off for their “special activity” which aroused a lot of interest and excitement, heightened by the fact they were to be allowed into the staff room to play some warm up games! The children really engaged with the warm up activities to get them to think about the most important thing in their lives and it wasn’t long before I was met by a sea of hands with ideas of what they wanted to paint. The children really engaged with the project and thought hard about what they wanted to paint, and once everyone had an idea we wrote it down next to their canvas so they didn’t forget what they were painting. It wasn’t long before the back of the classroom became a sea of activity, with the children getting well and truly stuck into mixing paint colours, drawing their pictures, and painting with a wide variety of materials, from sponges through to their hands, which ended up as a rather messy affair but the children really enjoyed it, especially the opportunity to paint whatever they liked and however they liked. The children all painted really different things, and I was surprised that they were not more materialistic – with paintings ranging from their family and parents, forests, through to pets and toys like lego. I think the children engaged with the project at quite a personal level and chose things that were most important to them. I was really surprised at how focused they all were on what they were doing, and they all wanted to work straight through their playtime to continue with the painting so they were obviously enjoying it! The paintings took most of the morning, and by the end of it I felt fairly exhausted and was covered in paint, but it was a really worthwhile experience – both to see the enjoyment the children got out of the project, but also their diverse ideas about the most important thing in their lives.
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If you would like to find out more about Community
Links, please see
www.community-links.org or telephone
020 7473 2270.
Nicola Hypher
Community Links is a UK based inner city charity that runs community based projects in the London borough of Newham, East London; one of the poorest boroughs in Europe. The charity was founded in 1977 and currently helps over 50,000 vulnerable children, young people and adults through education programmes, care schemes for children, advice and advocacy, training for adults, respite holidays for children with special needs and many other initiatives. The aim of the charity is to tackle the causes and consequences of social exclusion through practical activities. The young people in Newham have to deal with issues such as homelessness, drugs, crime and broken families. In order to tackle these issues Community Links offers projects including young people described as “at risk” by social services and special needs as well as projects focused on crime prevention, education and employment, sport, health and welfare.
Community Links offers many after school and holiday clubs and I visited during one of the days of the Easter holiday club. I had previously told them what KEEPS consisted of and they had offered the opportunity to the group of children asking for ten volunteers. We went away from the others to play the game as suggested by Ken with questions like who has the biggest belt, longest hair etc. They seemed to really enjoy the game and wanted to carry on playing it, although there was a lot of disagreement as to who won each round. Afterwards, when I asked them what they were going to paint they all came up with something very quickly and ran up to me to whisper in my ear straight away and so we were very soon able to start with the painting…!
It was a lovely day and there was an area outside which we were able to use. I set up the paints and the painting began. As they were painting I went round and checked what everyone was painting. Many of them had changed their minds from their original idea. I was surprised that one of the children decided to paint fireworks but decided not to say anything. However, when the kid next to him also said she was going to paint fireworks I had visions of bringing back 10 paintings of fireworks! I asked her whether fireworks was the most important thing in her life which prompted her to change her firework into the circle of life – considering how far she had gone with her firework painting the change was ingenious!
Within about 15 minutes of starting painting one of the kids announced he was finished and what he can do now (asking more games like before). I told him that he would have to go back with the others who weren’t taking part – “oh” was the very disappointed response, followed by silence and more painting. The kid went on to completely paint over the picture, and paint it all over again with more detail. One kid made a mistake on hers and asked for another canvas, I told her there wasn’t another canvas and so, after trying to remove the paint, she very cleverly incorporated the mistake into the picture.
The project was really enjoyable. It was extremely interesting to find out more of the very worthwhile projects that Community Links are involved in and I am very pleased and grateful that they agreed to participate in KEEPS.
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