Embodied segmented image project, hopefully.

A new project with young people at Woodlands Community Library and Hub in Doncaster working with lead creative Smizz. It’s working towards a mural for Brodsworth Colliery. The young people are being encouraged to generate the designs and then to produce the mural in situ. So, a balance between directing them and them finding the images within themselves.  Alongside it are workshops to enable them to bring ideas to the fore. One aspect that has arisen from my research into physical games that I never really thought about in terms of participatory arts is that art with others can adopt and use a ‘modular structure’. This means blocks that come together to make something, which can also be taken apart and bought together to make something else. So, the board game Cattan has a modular board. Similarly, it can be that a participatory work that has a number of undertakings for people to do then fits together to make a final work; this can also be using the design idea of ‘Accumulation’.  I have had an interest in my own research in the embodied work of Lygia Pape’s Divisor, a large sheet with holes in it for participants to put their heads in and then move as a whole. 

So here, as part of the work, I am trying to develop a kind of large form segmented puzzle structure; the young people draw around their bodies and then fill them in across a number of cardboard pieces. Hopefully, it will lead to them wearing the pieces in some way and then having to come together in space to reveal the whole picture. This is a way once more, as in other works, of animating something still and creating agency as an aesthetic. I am hoping I will have something visceral, like games like Twister, which, in terms of Cillois and his game’s taxonomy, would be termed ilinx (vertigo).  #art #creative #making #youngpeople #workshop #drawing #games