The
project at North Walney has been wonderfully vibrant and noisy so
far! Inspired by Schwitters use of found and ‘rescued’ materials,
we have been making our own collages. We’ve worked on a postcard
scale using leaves and materials brought in from the woodland, and
paper based materials such as newspapers and old bus tickets.
‘Natural’ versus ‘Human made’ has been a consistent theme,
and was very apparent in our larger collages, which mixed shells,
feathers and pine cones, with bottle tops, plastic cutlery, and bits
of old printer cartridges!
These A2 sized
creations were ephemeral works. Children enjoyed placing their
objects in pleasing compositions and photographing them before
dismantling them.
We
have taken the opportunity to explore the environment around school
with fresh eyes and ears, looking at the ‘collages’ or
juxtapositions of materials that occur accidentally in the school
playground. This has led on nicely to an exploration of sound, using
Schwitters sound poem ‘The Ursonate’ as a starting point. We
recorded the sounds we could hear around the school and turned them
into symbols and words with a view to creating our own Ursonate style
pieces later on. We have also made collage style sound compositions
with musical scores, themselves made of paper based collage
materials.
Next
steps are to get beyond the school gates seeking further inspiration
and material from the local area, focussing on the beach. This will
enable interesting comparisons to be made when we go to Langdale
valley, and the Merz barn where Schwitters did his final work. Deep
in the woods, under shadow of the mountains, the barn sits in a very
different environment to the school with it’s windswept beaches and
distant horizons. I wonder what creativity this will inspire!
Below Right: Visual Score piece using cut-outs as symbols for the duration and volume within a 10 second sequence, using particular sounds recorded by the boys and girls in school:
Amy Boud
Artist and Outdoor Learning Specialist,
North Walney Artspace
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