16th – 20th June 2008 saw me working in 8 schools in Wolverhampton. A truly wonderful week when i got to work with students ranging from year1 all the way through to year 9.
I had been commissioned by excellence in cities to participate in the cluster schools creativity week. the theme for the week was music and i was the only visual artist working alongside a number of musicians. My brief was a visual art piece about music that also combined all the schools artwork to create collaborative work. Oh and the challenge…each school needed a final piece to keep, meaning anything produced needed to be made 8 times, one for each school!
It just had to be a piece about disco music as for me this is a very visual musical era, with fashion and glitz playing as important a part as the music itself. prior to me going into the schools the students explored disco music and imagery, they designed disco outfits and gave individual responses to the music itself. This resulting text and their fashion drawings were printed onto acetate ready for inclusion in the final pieces.
During the week itself i taught the students how to make mixed media paper. They created windows in paper which they filled with disco inspired sparkly elements, each school did a different colour. The very youngest children drew with disco coloured pulp to create multi-coloured disco paper and the older children created their own window shapes. All the resulting paper was combined to create a disco dance floor complete with disco ball, text and disco dancers.
