February half term: Element and The Wallace Collection host a creative project with Islington care leavers
Are you sitting there wondering where February went? That’s okay because so are we. We’ve started the year as we mean to go on - with lots of exciting opportunities for young people to get creative. During the half term week alone we facilitated a trip to Tate Britain for Element creatives, ran a CV workshop supporting our network with creative careers, and kicked off a new project in collaboration with Centrepoint, all the while hosting a fantastic five-day project with The Wallace Collection.
Element Creatives at Elwood Street in Islington, discussing their first impressions of The Wallace Collection.
Our half-term project in collaboration with The Wallace offered care leavers in Islington an opportunity to explore their identities and familiarise themselves with the Collection’s works. Each day we travelled to the gallery and considered the forms of portraiture and painting on display, with specific themes in mind. Using the art works as stimulus for our own creative workshops, just some of the questions we considered were:
What are the features of a fête galante painting that construct an ‘ideal world’?
What ‘ancestral features’ are evident amongst the Wallace’s many portrait busts? And how can we sculpt and celebrate our own?
The Wallace’s Asante gold objects recall a mighty and powerful Kingdom in Ghana - which part of your identity are you most proud of?
Each afternoon we had the pleasure of welcoming a guest artist into the space to lead a creative workshop in their preferred medium. Over the course of the week Element creatives tried their hands at watercolour painting with Luisa Rivera, clay sculpting with Dulcie Davey, ink-making and textile-printing with Lorelle Boagye and zine designing with Nikki Gardham. Such a broad range of art forms allowed Islington young creatives an opportunity to try new things and resulted in many beautiful art works.
As always, the Element Project culminated in a celebration where every young person’s artwork was exhibited for guests to see. A guided tour of The Wallace Collection and a look at those objects that had inspired the project’s art-making was followed by a showcase in The Wallace’s learning centre. For us, it is important that the artistic achievements of care leavers and young people in London are viewed in the same way as those on the gallery walls. We’d like to thank The Wallace for taking steps to make this possible.
Of the project and partnership, The Wallace’s Community and Learning Producer, Holly Power, said:
"It was such a pleasure collaborating with Element and Islington Virtual School and welcoming the young creatives into The Wallace Collection. Together we explored many powerful themes around identity using works in the Collection as our starting point. I really enjoyed hearing and seeing all of the creative responses the group came up with across the week. This project demonstrates a fantastic collaboration between a gallery, charity, local council and artists, resulting in many art works that the participants can feel proud of."