Collaborative Canvas

A project I have been so happy to work on this month is the Collaborative Canvas at Wildwood Festival. It’s been a long time since I did a project like this - (the last one being Intransit Festival, London in 2015) and I was really excited to test it out again.

It was a great success!

With a dream team of friends - including a peacock! - we built a plywood canvas that was located in a prime position just in front of the festival castle. I designed a composition of a landscape depicting the festival with a sharpie.

When the festival opened on the Friday night we had barely finished building and securing the structure before little friends came to get stuck in with the paints to decorate it. They wasted no time in unleashing their creative expression!

The next morning we spent an hour reapplying a little structure back into the composition by adding a light wash to some areas of the image to bring out the castle and the tree without loosing the energy and texture of the mark making made the night before.

Over the course of the rest of the weekend it was a beautiful dialogue between the children and the team, taking it in turns to add texture, colour, pattern and redefining composition.

The children who were drawn to getting stuck in ranged from toddler to teens. Lower down on the canvas children barely able to walk were excited to make their mark with big brush strokes and even bigger smiles. Older children got really into the detail, shading to create volume, learning about light and dark to create a 3D effect.

One of my favourite moments was late on the Saturday evening whilst enjoying the DJ set, I noticed several children walking up to the artwork and really taking it in, mesmerised. I’m not sure if they were looking of the bits they had worked on or whether energetically it invited them in as it was made by the children themselves.

Whilst working on this project at Wildwood, I was reminded of the joy I feel when working on collaborative pieces. Seeing the joy on children’s (and parents!) faces was nourishing for the soul. Seeing their concentration and creative energy come out and how thrilled they were to see their work on public display.

Working as a part of a collective, seeing your work transformed by others adding to it later, its a beautiful dance of learning to let go of perfectionism and control. Embracing the joy of experimental play and exploration

I’m stoked by how wonderful the project went. I have so many more ideas of how we could develop this for next year and it’s also inspired some other ideas around interactive play sculptures too… Watch this space. the creative juices are flowing!