So it’s been a bit quiet on the enquiremanchester blog front of late. Well, this can only be testament to how busy we’ve been since the Christmas break – and it’s half term already!
If you remember, Chorlton High School and Newall Green High School have been working with me at the Museum and artists Naomi Kendrick and Matt George. We’ve been investigating ways of delivering speaking and listening programmes for secondary schools – with the support of Manchester City Council’s Museum And Gallery Project In Education (MAGPIE).
Naomi and Matt have both worked with each school. At Chorlton High School we’ve been working with the fantastic Caroline Morgan and her Year 7 English students (with help from brill Diane Clavin). And at Newall Green we’ve been working with the superb Louise Mills and her Year 8 art and design students. When we all initially met to plan the projects we thought it would be a great opportunity for the students to meet with both artists and to see how they reconciled the two ways of working. Naomi introduced her ‘multi-sensory installations’ alongside Kit Wright’s ‘The Magic Box’ poem and Matt has been using ‘interactive art’ to bring the installations to life.
At each step of the way we’ve been encouraging the students to make their own decisions about what direction to take their work in, think and act like artists, and talk about their work informally with us and with each other. There have also been elements of formal presentation back to the group, and this will be explored even further in Matt’s ‘artist interviews’ session and at the final ‘installation preview’ event at the museum. At the last session I noticed the difference between how confidently students spoke about what they’d made themselves in comparison with more abstract questions about the session.
Here’s a few pics of the ‘sketch-boxes’ as they have become known, and figures used in the animations.
Enquiremanchester's Weblog 