I’ll be back in St Albans as artist in residence at the new museum St Albans Museums from 21 – 23 august. More giant pop-up cardboard frameworks which will be used to create three collaborative works with families exploring the lives of local women through the ages – the fierce and revolutionary queen Boudicca, noblewoman and shrewd business woman, Sarah Churchill, and local Suffragette, Constance Lytton.
Artist in residence for week two (28 – 30 aug) is the wonderful textile artist Felicity Cooke Flea Cooke Art. Image shows my pop-up roman kitchen workshop at St Albans Verulamium Museum in 2017.
Just back this week from High Sun Solstice Camp where I collaborated with Irma Irsara on a large-scale bird using paper-engineering principles. We were able, with the help of everyone at the camp, to create this from scratch over a 4 day period. We also ran workshops in pop-up design for a couple of hours each day. We eventually bid farewell to our bird in a very moving ceremony on the last day. Much love and thanks to everyone, especially Jonathan for making this a very special camp for us.
I’ll be running a series of adult workshops in pop-up design at the High Sun Solstice Camp in Cambridgeshire along with Irma Irsara. We’ll also be creating a large-scale, moving bird based on the prototypes in the video below.
The design will be similar to a pop-up book mechanism – think of the bird’s wings as pages of a book. The mouth will also open and close by means of a string at the back of the head and elastic inside the beak and we’ll be using natural material from the forest to decorate the creature. There’s been a certain amount of advance planning and trouble shooting ahead of time on this one, in order to make things run smoothly and keep everyone engaged.
High Sun is organised by my friend Jonathan Lambert who I had the pleasure of working with on one of Wordpepper’s children’s theatre productions.
I’ll be running two half-term workshops at the Verulamium Museum (The Museum of Everyday Life in Roman Britain) in St. Albans next month. Verulamium was the third largest city of Roman Britain and the museum stands on the site of the Roman town.
Both workshops are based around the theme of the Roman kitchen, allowing plenty of scope for food, implements, vessels, tools, pets and other rooms in the background. Workshop 1 will consist of making simple individual pop-up frameworks and adding the various elements to build up a 3D picture.
Workshop 2 (free) is a drop-in session where you get to help co-create a giant work of three dimensional art! The children will create and add the elements to a large pre-prepared, collapsible, cardboard framework, using the museum’s exhibits for inspiration. The finished piece will be displayed at the museum for a short period of time.
Further information about the workshops and the museum:
The Word Festival is an innovative programme of activities, events and workshops focusing on and exploring the pleasure of reading, writing and freedom of expression in Islington. Launched in 2012, and delivered annually since then, the Word Festival Programme is a partnership initiative between Islington Council’s Library and Heritage Services, Arts Service, All Change and Free Word.
This year artist Irma Irsara and I are proud to co-produce an event with Word17 at Finsbury Park Trust on Saturday 17th June (full details below). We’ll be running two workshops in pop-up design, illustration and wordplay for small children and their families. Make your very own pop-up creations by learning to develop basic mechanisms to create more complex designs, all in easy-to-follow steps.
It’s also an opportunity to develop spatial awareness and explore ideas of transformation while practicing construction and craft-making skills. At the same time, we will be exploring descriptive wordplay in a fun and accessible way.
The starting point is the idea of someone special to you and how you would describe them using individual words and phrases. We are also interested in the idea of different languages. The event is targeted at younger children who are beginning to connect words and construct sentences.
The workshops are free and all materials are supplied – you just bring the creativity.
Suitable for children age 5 and upwards along with parents and carers.
Saturday 17th June 2017, 11am – 1pm & 2 – 4pm
Finsbury Park Trust, 225-229 Seven Sisters Road, London N4 2DF
No booking required – arrive early to avoid disappointment.
For those who missed my workshop at the Geffrye Museum last week, fear not, here’s the tutorial. Learn two mechanisms and create a chick that flies out of an egg, before coming up with some designs of your own. The workshop was organized by Hackney Arts as part of their Kids Who Can – Easter Arts Club. Check out some of the creations from the day at the bottom of the post, including a few alternative designs.
Below are some examples of the great work produced by the kids at my workshop at the Verulamium Museum, St Albans yesterday.
The workshop was linked to a bigger project, All In It Together, run St Albans Arts Team, with the aim of exploring ideas of propaganda versus reality with particular reference to World War 1 – a lot of the posters were produced at the time by St Albans based printers Dangerfields at the time.
The children created swing cards with pop-up elements which showed transformation from slogan-based designs to depictions of destroyed landscapes inspired by the work of Paul Nash. Some wanted to depict other wars – WW2, the Blitz, evacuation – creating narratives around stories they heard from grandparents, parents or school.
Back from Budapest where I spent time working with the kids and staff at the British International School. I was helped by the school’s wonderful librarian who acted as my wing-woman for the entire 3 days and made sure everything ran to schedule.
After my initial school talk, I ran a series of workshops with all classes where I showed the children how to make their own pop-up books.
A pattern for the sessions emerged fairly early on when I matched each class to a mechanism, guiding them through the process so they all had a completed pop-up framework ready to go. Following a discussion about their storyboard ideas – the blank storyboards were sent ahead of my arrival – I used some of their material to demonstrate how to convert mechanism into fully illustrated 3D scene. Some of the images show these, others show the children’s work-in-progress.
The school places huge importance on reading and runs several initiatives to encourage the love of books. At a certain point each day, everyone drops everything to read for five minutes. The doors were also being decorated as book covers while I was there – check out the Detective Paws ‘door cover’.
If you like beards and pop-up books and have young children, then this is the workshop for you.
Make your own beard-themed pop-up creation in my next hands-on, half-term workshop at the Florence Nightingale Museum. For my return visit to this lovely venue located within St Thomas‘ Hospital, I’m taking my inspiration from ‘The Age of the Beard’ exhibition currently on show there to deliver three 1-hour family sessions encompassing 3D paper skills, design and illustration.
Learn how to make pop-ups with moving parts and how to assemble a finished book.
The workshops are suitable for 5+ with parents and carers. Adults will be encouraged to take part but don’t worry, no experience necessary and results are guaranteed. Materials will be provided, you just bring the creativity!
The workshops are free but normal entry fee to the museum applies. Booking is recommended.
John O'Leary 