Showing posts with label London. Show all posts
Showing posts with label London. Show all posts

Monday 14 September 2015

Kids...'Walk Through British Art'

'Walk Through British Art' is a series of galleries at Tate Britain which in their words is, "...a walk through time", through their collection from 1545 to the present. "There are no designated themes or movements; instead, you can see a range of art made at any one moment in an open conversational manner."


Fuelled by lunch, having seen the Barbara Hepworth exhibition, which you can read about here, we headed into the permanent galleries. I watched and chatted to my kids, intrigued to see how the Tate's 'open conversational manner' approach to displaying art worked itself out in our conversation.
What made them tick in the Tate?

Materials

Quite often it was the materials and the questions surrounding their use that drew in the kids, especially my youngest son and his friend.

Such as bread.
"Bread people".

"Do you think he bought sliced bread?
"How did he cut the bread to make room for the body shape? Did he cut round someone or use a mould of a person?"

"Bet it smells."

"I want to climb on them." Fortunately at 12 years old, he knew better.

Puzzles

Sometimes it was the challenge of a piece of art that captured the kids' imagination. Especially if the work presented itself as a bit of a puzzle.

Art in corners.
"I really can't tell if those shapes are printed on the wall or hanging there."

This was one of those pieces of work in a gallery that make you go and get your mum.
"Can I show you something really cool?"

"That's mad."
"That's not a hole is it? There's no way that's a hole."
We were so close, yet couldn't tell. Clever!



"Mum look, 3D or not 3D." He was pleased with himself for the pun.


Familiarity

We all like the work that reminded us of something, something within our experience.

"Do you remember seeing that Gilbert & George exhibition in Exeter?"

"That looks like Britain overcoming the Nazis in the Second World War. They start to break up, then at the end they are shattered apart."
We look at the label and find out that this was in fact made in the seventies. It is though, a comment on racism.
"Racism is breaking down. Good."


"I've seen this before. I like the colours, the splash." Says a teenager unafraid of colour.
"What even those greys?"
"Grey's not a horrible colour. You wear a lot of grey." True.


"I recognised that from the airport. I saw a security camera and the inside of a suitcase looked liked that."

Kids seem to want a work of art to be about something.
"What's this meant to be?"
"It's meant to be art."
"But what's it all about?"

So when no "about" is mentioned, they start to decide for themselves, more often than not applying concrete rather than abstract concepts.

"It looks like a ship."

"They look like singing worms."
"Friendly creatures."
"What is it about them that makes them look friendly?"

Hard Work

Hard work is acknowledged and respected.

"Those words must have taken a long time to do, especially if they did it manually", says a child from a digital age.

What they didn't get.

"How is that a work of art, it just looks like a messy room."
"That is not someone with a good life because they have mess all over their bed, things you don't really need. If they had a good life, they'd have a bedside light and loads of books."


The comments of two boys, not yet teenagers, on a comment made by the artist on her own life.
Do you think Tracy Emin has bedside light nowadays?"
Having a bedside light obviously says a lot about a person.

At this point, two delighted boys find and show us the smallest spider web, connecting her bedside table to her mattress. The Tate has a squatter, do they know? Does Tracy Emin know?


"What's the point? It's not saying anything important."
"It's a wire sculpture. Like a wire drawing. Sometimes when you draw, you make more than one line don't you. I think it's beautiful, a gentle, soft, wire drawing."


This was our conversation, Whether or not our responses were what the artists or Tate imagined, it's what we talked about. We would have liked a bit more "about" conversation with the Tate. When you're nine and twelve years old, it's important that galleries answer some of your questions. I reckon the Tate could have joined in a little more with the conversation, information was sparse.

As you can see, kids do get on with it, get engaged, make comments and stop themselves climbing on some very tempting pieces of sculpture, but at times things can come to a dead end.
"I don't know what it's supposed to be."

Tate Britain, Walk Through British Art galleries is free, open every day. What's stopping you visiting?
Unless you're scared of spiders.
Details on their website here.

Just in case you were wondering. It was a hole. I can't tell you how we found out, but I promise we did not touch the artwork.

UPDATE: To answer my son's questions about how Anthony Gormley cut the bread for the body shape in the sculpture above, We have since found out (from the telly) that he ate all the bread required to to make a 3D outline of himself. 

Wednesday 19 August 2015

Barbara Hepworth at Tate Britain: a Twitter Tour

On the strength of my post 'Tate Britain from the Floor', which you can see here, I was invited to do a Twitter Tour for the Barbara Hepworth exhibition at Tate Britain for the @tate_kids account.

So today I took over the @tate_kids account and tweeted our visit, a virtual tour of the exhibition, sharing our family's experiences. I say 'family', we also took a friend, nine year old charlie. So here's my tour, as you can see it's not my Twitter account, it's the Tate Kids, but it's all me.



















Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World is on at Tate Britain until 25th October 2015. Details on their website, here.
It is a paying exhibition and I have to thank Tate Britain for inviting us to see it.

Update: I made a mistake. I have to admit I'm not 42. In all the excitement, I knocked a few years off my age. Thanks to a lovely friend who felt she had to point this out.

Friday 14 August 2015

Four kids go to the Horniman Museum

What to do in the summer holidays?
Especially when your mum is working. Well firstly, have friends over, prevents boredom and therefore lessens the potential for squabbling, then perhaps go out. So we organised for a friend each to come over and a trip to the Horniman Museum, where I was working that afternoon in the Discovery For All session in the Hands-on Base.


The Hands-on Base in the Horniman Museum is exactly what it says it is. A gallery full of objects to touch. I armed the kids with a camera and was intrigued to find out what they got up to, what they looked at and and what exactly captured their imagination.

They began with the 'Teeth' Discovery Box.


Silver teeth.


Fossilised teeth, a mammoth's.


Wooden teeth.


Photo opportunity teeth.
Everyone does this with the shark's jaw.


Next the 'Toys' Discovery Box.


Toys from recycled materials.


As a student I remember playing Mancala but have long since forgotten the rules.
However, another family hadn't forgotten and they taught my kids how to play. They sat and played Mancala for ages, two groups of visitors who hadn't met before. I love that! 


This wasn't their only opportunity to meet and interact with other visitors. The Puffer fish often draws people together.  


We learn from a family from Ecuador that in Spanish it is called a "balloon fish". "Cool!"


They swap the camera and take photos of each other.



 They listen,


...perform, on their own,


 ...together,


... dance,


...and wonder how long this snake would had been were the head and tail still attached.


  Of course a museum visit is not all about the objects.


"Mum, mum, I got to show you something."
"What?"
"What's this doing here?"


They have expectations of what should be included in museum collections. And plastic halloween masks are not one of them.

The Hands-on Base is only open for the 'Discovery For All' sessions which are Sunday mornings and some afternoons in the school holidays.
Details on the Horniman Museum website, here.

Thanks to Miriam, Tom, Naomi and Roman for the photos and providing even more evidence that museums are not "boring".

Thursday 16 July 2015

Life on Foot


Life on Foot, the exhibition of Camper's story of shoe making is on at the Design Museum.
Lorenzo Fluxa founded Camper after inheriting his father's shoe factory in Mallorca in 1975, introducing the camper logo, the Red Bridge, in 1981 with his first store in Barcelona.


Camper has been around for 40 years and despite spending my sixth-form weekends working in a shoe shop, Manfield in Chesham High Street, I had never heard of them until five or six years ago. That's when I bought a pair of their slippers, which are still going strong. I love those slippers.


Rainbows of camper shoes and materials.


Camper produces sustainable and ethical footwear. The first camper shoes experimented with used recycled car tyres for soles. 
These shoes below are fully bio-degradable, experimenting with hemp and coconut. "Those grey ones on the right look a little like my slippers."





I applaud their commitment to sustainable materials, but can see that wearing cork is perhaps a little more suitable to the Spanish climate than ours.


In an average collection of Camper shoes, over 350 materials are used, components that remind me of "Ink Blots". I can't help myself looking for things in the shapes and checking to see if the patterns are symmetrical.



The shoe box, "a basic yet important part of footwear manufacture and retailing". Too right. What is so appealing about a brand new shoe box? It's not as if we keep them (for long).


However good packaging has always been so appealing. It's strange though, with the power of packaging to tempt us to purchase, you generally get to see a shoebox after you have decided to buy the shoes. "Do you want the Box?" I always asked as a teenager in Manfield. Now the shoe's on the other foot (sorry), I get asked this when I buy my kids shoes. Of course they want the box, a new home for a toy hamster, a lunar landscape, a treasure chest, the possibilities are endless and made even more appealing by boxes like these.


From this archive material we can see that it wasn't just about the shoe and manufacturing, but Camper's concepts extended to the designs of packaging and visual merchandising too.

Camper regularly collaborates with graphic designers,




...and store designers.


White moulded shoes from the wall of a Camper store in new York, 2014.



Life on Foot is on at the Design Museum until 1st November 2015.
Details on their website here.


What ever happened to Manfield?
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