Case Study
Robert Sandilands Primary School and Nursery Art Week 2009
At Robert Sandilands we run an Art Week every other year, and the theme this year was "movement". This idea was inspired by a presentation by Ruth Thomson from the Ben Uri Gallery. She had worked with other schools in West Berkshire as part of the Gallery's "Art in the Open" project and her new project really triggered our imaginations!
Ruth had produced a pack for primary schools which included copies of paintings and sculptures from the gallery. We selected some of the Ben Uri artworks to use as starting points for the childrens work across the school and supplemented them with others that linked with the theme. Our class teachers also recorded the children during games, dance and gym lessons to provide a set of photographs for the children to use as reference. The very youngest children in our Foundation Stage Unit made art while they were on the move, using Jackson Pollock and Bruce McLean as references. Indoors we used marbles, toy cars, hand prints and footprints to make pictures showing movement. The children also produced some fantastic paintings in the outdoor classroom using scooters and bikes to make tracks. The F2 class worked together to make a very large scale work of paint patterns created by dancing and jumping across a canvas.
Key stages 1 and 2 started their week with a drawing workshop. The aim of this was to build on what each phase had already worked on in curriculum time. The younger children were encouraged to focus on observing and recording body shapes accurately, whilst the older children were encouraged to think about using diagonals to make their compositions dynamic. Foundation Stage used digital photography as their method of recording and, using props and dressing up clothes, recreated a set of paintings showing movement.
In KS1 we looked very carefully at an anonymous painting of men dancing from the Ben Uri collection. The children discussed the techniques the artist had used so that we could tell the men were moving and inspired by this, went on to use their photos and drawings of PE lessons as starting points for their own projects. They worked in 2d using paper collage, starting by producing individual works, then moving on to work as a whole class to produce large scale collages. The children were then introduced to the sculpture "The Dancer" by Adam Kops and spent some time discussing the difference between 2d and 3d art before going on to make their own sculptures using newspaper and aluminium foil. Children in years 3 and 4 were thinking about how artists eliminate detail and use blurring to create a sense of movement and discussed a series of paintings and press photographs before starting on their own work. In these classes we started by mixing photography and pastels to create pictures showing movement by including blurring.
We then went on to study another work from the Ben Uri Gallery. "Horseriders" by David Bomberg inspired first some individual work using art straws and then mixed media pictures where the children used recycled materials to produce pictures on a much larger scale. In the upper juniors, we were thinking in particular about how using diagonals in our compositions creates a dynamic feel in art. We looked at a series of paintings which allowed us to compare the stillness of horizontal and vertical composition with the dynamism of diagonal composition. For their own project, the children focused on 3d work again using Adam Kops work as their starting point. They worked using wire, newspaper and modroc to produce their own sculptures inspired by sport and dance.
During the week Robert Sandilands was lucky to be visited by 2 working artists. Designer and illustrator Jane Yates joined us to support the drawing workshop in KS1 and produced some very fine results with some of our youngest children. Later in the week, sculptor Adam Kops came to work with a group of children in KS2 where the children worked in pairs to produce sculptures on a larger scale. We were thrilled with the variety and quality of the work that the children produced and are hoping that the success of this project will be the start of a long term relationship between the Ben Uri Gallery and Robert Sandilands School.
Maria Morgan, Art Coordinator and Julia Frank, Art Assistant.
