A community arts project delivered for the Guinness Partnership; providing a platform to celebrate the creative talent of children living in the vicinity of Guinness’s new housing development in Stonehouse.

Children from local primary schools were invited to attend a two-day workshop exploring architecture and creating designs for a dream home. The designs were realised in 2 and 3-dimensional form and then photographed and digitally montaged to create townscapes. The composite images  were then enlarged and printed onto the hoardings surrounding the building site.

The Illuminate parade was an annual event which was part of a wider city project leading up to Plymouth’s Mayflower 2020 celebrations.

I was commissioned to work with three groups; High View School to make dragonfly costumes, Western Mill School to make fish headdress' and the Highbury Trust to make flower power costumes.

The school children made all the decorative elements of the costumes, making colourful windows for the dragonfly tails and for the fish the children made glittery luminous spines and scales. 

There was a total of 30 dragonfly costumes and 26 fish headdress'. The overall effect of  bobbing fish tails and flapping of the dragonfly wings was quite spectacular. 

This was a commission for a  mural to help soften the appearance of a 180 square meter concrete retaining wall for the Guinness Trusts new housing development in Stonehouse, Plymouth .

Included here are photos of the finished mural from different angles and photos of the mural in progress. Also shown are a number of  shortlisted visual mockups which were produced in consultation with residents

Behind The Curtains

An installation made for the Stonehouse Action 2013 Union Street Community gallery, utilising an empty shop facade to create the impression of an inhabited dwelling with children playing and peeping from behind the curtained windows. A further piece transformed the  window into a stage complete with red velvet curtains revealing archived footage from the Baim Collection of  1940s variety acts. Many of these acts were know to have been performed in various theatres on Union Street in the 1940s. This double installation was designed  as a catalyst to encourage interest from artists to utilise other empty shop windows to lighten up the darkened Union Street facades.

A two day drop in workshop, making Alexander Calder and Joseph Cornell inspired artworks with an Ocean themed twist. Participants were involved in creating elegant mobiles and magical memory box dioramas whilst surrounded by fully immersive kinetic instillations of semi-abstract fish shaped and sail shaped forms.

This was a much needed £50,000 project to regenerate a inner-city rundown playground with funding procured from a Community Spaces Big Lottery Award .

This was a multi layered  project involving numerous strands including; setting up a community group 'Friends of Wyndham Square', procuring  funding, tendering playground equipment providers, project managing the build and organising numerous events.  

Wallpaper created from individual images produced by children at High View School in Efford Plymouth as part of a wider project exploring the theme of the dragonfly as an emblem for the school.  The children also made gigantic charcoal drawings and three dimensional willow dragonfly’s.

The project was commissioned by the Arts organisation Take A Part as an element of their Creativity in the Community project

This was a project with High View School in Efford Plymouth where I was asked to work with children to create a whole school display that highlighted the global concerns about the issue of plastic waste polluting the ocean. The resulting design evolved through a series of workshops with children who went on to help create this statement anti plastic mural, showing fish that had ingested plastic waste and had evolved into monstrous mutant forms. The statement “Mutant Plastic Future ! “ was woven into the background as a means to remind everyone of the potential danger facing the creatures in our oceans. All the materials used in the project were recycled waste plastics collected from the local scrap store.

A collaborative mural representing the concept of Darwins’ evolutionary ‘tree of life’. Shown by the children at High View school in its simplest form with the names of more complex species of animals along the top layer of the mural and less complex animals on the bottom layer.  The mural is made up of around 132 children’s, individually designed abstract paintings. The younger children were tasked with the less difficult sections of the mural. The older children painted the sections that included  the branches of the tree and were also responsible for overlaying their designs with the names of animals

This is an installation showing a cross section of the Mayflower ship at the start of its voyage from Plymouth in September 1620.

It was designed as an ongoing learning resource and research tool to encourage children at High View School to learn about the Mayflower and the plight of its passengers.

Each of the 132 passengers and crew members of the Mayflower are represented by dolls which were made by year 3 to year 6 children. Each doll has a tag with the name of the passenger they represent.

Over the course of a year the children found out and documented what happened to each passenger represented by their doll.

Working with students at City College Plymouth using recycled materials to create a concept design for a public sculpture for the entrance to the MVV energy centre in Plymouth. Employing assemblage and photomontage techniques to create designs that explored the use of composition texture and scale.

Working with community and school groups around Stonehouse to produce 100 illuminated shooting star lanterns each with a concealed wish representing an aspiration from the neighbourhood. The stars were  part of a wider project celebrating the centenary of the amalgamation of the three towns; commissioned by the Stonehouse Timebank, funded by an Awards for All grant and project managed by the arts organisation Take A Part. Many thanks to all the schools and community groups who made this possible. Please scroll through to see photos documenting the project

Iindividually designed masks inspired by African artefacts and developed by stylising  photographs of  African animals. Made from cardboard, powder colour and found objects

Year 3, Mount House School. Project  designed broadly in line with National Curriculum guidelines for achievement at level 3 and above. The project was based on the theme of Pre-Columbian artefacts making cross-curricular links with the pupil’s summer term Aztec history project. Pupils explored ideas for their work after viewing and analysing examples of zoomorphic and anthropomorphic Pre-Columbian sculptures. They then developed a design for a symmetrical, part-human, part-animal figure, making particular reference to Mesoamerican Tolima gold work. These designs were developed in clay to make a relief figure after investigating additive and subtractive ceramic techniques on a slab base. Comparisons were then made with North American totem figures providing further opportunities for evaluation.

Year 8, Mount House School.