Key Stage 3 students worked intensely with artist Jon Bielstein in full-day outreach workshops following their visits to Paul Granjon’s Oriel Factory. Students engaged in lively group exercises that illuminated how electricity works, then made their own simple switches to control moving elements within their scrap sculptures.
To create these, Jon led them through a series of processes based on designing with materials, prototyping, justifying their decisions and team-working. This project was part of Oriel Davies’ Start programme funded by The Prince’s Foundation for Children & the Arts.
Artist and blacksmith Angharad Pearce Jones spent four days in a local school working with Year 4, 5 and 6 pupils, where they created individual ‘whirligig’ constructed sculptures. Oriel Davies will be displaying these and other young people’s artworks made during the 2011-12 Start schools programme in the gallery’s education space this summer term. Angharad is also featured in our Beyond Pattern resource pack for teachers.
Artist Helen Kennedy worked with two of our Start Programme primary schools after their visits to Paul Granjon’s Oriel Factory. Key Stage 2 pupils collected waste plastics, cardboard and metal, discussing their particular recycling issues, characteristics and functions and explored how these could be used to construct robots with moving parts. Another school focussed on the environmental implications and creative potential of plastic objects found in marine flotsam and jetsam to make a huge temporary floor installation, as well as an owl sculpture from milk bottles for their school garden.
Poet Chris Kinsey and education officer Helen Kozich accompanied school groups visiting the workshop zone and robot-inhabited gallery space that was Oriel Factory. Pupils learned about artist Paul Granjon’s ideas and working processes, interacted enthusiastically with his experimental robots and had a go at generating electricity on a bicycle power station. They used drawing and creative writing to develop robot designs, inspired by the discarded and up-cycled electronic waste and ideas about recycling and energy use they encountered during the visit. Participants later developed their own sculptures back at school as part of Oriel Davies' Start outreach workshops programme.
