Pigeon Art Workshops

Geoffrey Field Infant School completed a three day workshop with children from 3 to 7 junk modelling, paper mosaicking and printing with natural materials.

Judy and Lydia had a day with all of the children in the school to do some printmaking based on ‘Materials and ‘Houses and Homes’ where the children made two communal streets, one each for KS1 and KS2. A lovely child-centred and friendly piece of work.  The children did a great job and were really pleased with themselves.

We worked alongside two Primary School Art Specialists in their classrooms in the Meldrum Network of schools to advise on and demonstrate printing techniques that could be rolled out over a number of weeks with the children. In total 12 schools were visited and the work was specifically geared to how the specialists timetables were organised – a tailor-made project.

Thomas Buxton Junior School in Tower Hamlets, London, wanted something that the whole school could participate in. We worked with the children to generate designs and then each class made images to go with their class names which are all animals. Finished it just before the rains came!

Winnersh Primary School in Berkshire produced two beautiful metre square mosaics in a day in July – all the children’s own work. This is really lovely stuff.  One piece is for the entrance to the school and one will go into the playground.

Some lovely work here for De Bohun Primary School in North London. The older children worked on the wall of the school nursery to brighten up their outdoor area and did a beautiful job of it. We have worked with De Bohun over a number of years, working with their pupils to make 16 panels of murals in the playgrounds, a beautiful mosaic Welcome sign and textile work for the inside of the school.

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!