Bigger Picture

A night of Utopic dreaming, drawing, soundscapes and compost in collaboration with Soundfytes  www.soundfytes.net

White Night the annual all night arts festival in Brighton, had ”Utopias’ as its theme. We decided to create an interactive space within the fantastic Open Market site hosted by the arts group CompARTment www.compartment.org.uk

After creating a suitably utopic space scattered with plants , post-capitalist shopping trolley mobile gardens and a soundscape comprising of interviews on utopias, we invited participants to take one of our flat pack plant pots made from recycled cardboard and to write and draw their visions of a perfect utopian society.  They took away this plant pot with a seed and some compost with which to plant the seed of their ideas. We also conducted audio interviews with particpants and live edited these and played them back our on our 12 volt looping soundscape.

Participants came up with a host of dreamy ideas from ‘people buy things from shops with smiles instead of money’ to ‘Free movement – no waste’ .

Harting Primary School, West Sussex

The right to play, to have food, to be loved, to good health, to have fun.

We collaborated with 50 pupils from ages 5-10yrs and explored the concepts of ‘The Rights of the Child” through a participatory Bunting printing workshop. We showed a short film by the Childrens Alliance explaining the ideas from the UN convention on  the Rights of the child in an easily digestible format. After creating mind-maps and having discussions in small groups on why childrens rights matter and what rights there might be, pupils chose their favourite ‘childrens right’ and then proceeded to learn how to turn this word into a block print. These were then used to print giant pieces of fabric bunting triangles which will be sewn together into a giant string of oversized bunting and displayed as an installation in the school library.

As part of Brighton Zinefest, we ran an introductory workshop to d.i.y screen printing. Here are some of the results…

Screen printed Pow!

Drying screen print

This beautiful print was made by a 4 yr old!

We went along to the  Envision Warm Up event where we asked young people what they thought about the government spending cuts. They wrote their opinions on a label and pinned it on our giant pair of scissors.

Spending Cuts: have your say

Exhibition time: White Night Open Sesame Bazaar

Collaborating with print maker Liz Lake, we held a series fo 3 pop up print workshops with BHASVIC art students. We spent the sessions getting to know the market, interacting with the stall holders, mindmapping and thinking about where our food comes from, trying out experimental drawing techniques, monoprinting, potato printing, silk screen printing…

The workshops took place at the compARTment space at the Open Market. By the end of the workshops, the students had made two different collaborative screen-prints and an individual hand-bound book each which was displayed at White Night.

Session2: handmade books standing up to dry

Session2: handmade book and print

Session1: Prints drying

Bigger Picture created an interactive information stall, with displays about the history of food production and the rich apple heritage of England, now largely diminished. Passers by were invited to have a go at ‘apple printing’ and took away with them a hand made card with instructions within on how to grow and plant apple trees.

Apple information display

Apple printing

Apple printing