Pigeon Art Workshops

The Meldrum network of schools in Northeast Scotland – twelve primary schools – are having an exciting link project with their local secondary school.  The oldest children in the primary schools will be working with the secondary school students to produce digital images of their local environments.

The art specialists will work with the children to create artwork based on the images and then all of the children – 52 at a time – will spend a day in the art department of the secondary school with Briony and Judy to create mosaic images of the landscapes, generating a huge amount of mosaic artwork to show at the Academy (secondary school) in the autumn term.

These will be returned to the primary schools for permanent display after the exhibition.  Briony has met and worked with all of the children involved in the project and will meet them again for the final work.

We think the work is phenomenal – our largest mosaic project yet. The children made sixteen large panels to be exhibited together in the autumn term, 2009. We have put a few here for you give you a taste. Follow the link to our flickr site to see the rest.

At Thomas Fairchild Community School in Hackney we worked on a ‘Planets and Science Fiction’ theme.  The children made willow sculptures of the solar system which the school will hang in their corridor and clay models of images from a science fiction story that they had read in class – lots of facts and fun.

At the end of June Pigeon is working with the Meldrum Community Schools Network of 12 schools on a link project, making mosaics. We have been doing lots of preparation work with the children and think that it’s too good not to show you a couple of pieces.

Briony ran the first of her illustrator’s seminars; Working As A Book Illustrator, on Saturday at the community centre in Nairn. It was a great opportunity for the artists who would be illustrators to get together and chat and to share experiences and hopes. Everyone got the chance to share work and to see what the other artists got up to – including Briony – and hopefully there will be follow up informal get-togethers after this and perhaps the beginnings of an illustrators’ group beginning in the north of Scotland. The second seminar is being considered for the end of the summer - watch this space for news!

Dunningford Primary School in Hornchurch, Essex, are having eight days of workshops.  The first four days took place before the half term with Judy and Lydia and were printmaking sessions throughout the school. The work went up on the fourth day to make a fantastic range of displays.  (We’ll put your displays up for you if time is built into the booking.)

They are going to follow this up beginning tomorrow with four days of construction in willow and tissue, every class getting a second opportunity to make something -a really exciting way to end the summer term.  We’ll get the work up at the end of the week to show you all what they got up to.

For the second half of Dunningford’s project they made some fantastic willow sculptures, one of which can be seen here. This frog looks as though it really could catch flies!