Wild Art on Wimbledon Common – day 2

We arrived for the second morning of our Wild Art on Wimbledon Common course to our undisturbed camp – always a relief to find our art work untouched by the nights activities!

Click HERE to see DAY 1’s activities

Today was to be mostly about mud, so we mixed a gorgeous pile of sticky stuff for our little creative hands to work with.

When the children arrived we learnt how to make mud faces. Artist and teacher Ellie Green from Surrey Art School came to help us for the day.

We learnt how to make the mud the right consistency to stick to the tree.

How to add moss, berries and leaves to create features on a face.

Then we got down and dirty with the mud ourselves

We spent a while experimenting with the new material and getting it to the right consistency to stick to our chosen tree. The aim was to release the spirit of the tree we worked with and give it visual form.

We began to experiment with leaves, twigs, moss and berries

Some incredible beings emerged.

After a break and a good run around we divided into teams to start work on a giant mother spider to watch over our camp.

We sketched out a basic shape in the ground.

One team went to gather sticks to make legs.

We needed 16 pieces of wood of similar length to make the legs. They needed to be lashed together in a special way to give them strength and stability.

The mud team were in charge of making the body.

Some dug

Some mixed in the water

Some sculpted the body shape.

The legs were coming together

And so was the body

So we started to join them together. We had to hammer the legs into the ground.

We started to decorate the head and body with leaves and berries.

She was looking fairly intimidating!

Some of us  started to think about how we would join all the elements of our installation together.

We worked on a veil to separate our new world from the real one!

We added small decorative details to our lanterns – including little jars and night lights hanging inside.

We made arrows to guide people around

New giant portals appeared – this one was a development from one made yesterday, on a larger scale. It linked the boys’ three mud spirits!

This giant portal was to transport our parents into our space – it contained all the elements we had worked with; ferns, moss, leaves, holly etc.
A night light in the centre guided the way…

We tidied our villages and paths that linked them together.

We were now ready to welcome our parents into our newly transformed space.

We gave them tours and told the stories of our 2 day adventure.

We were very proud of our work, and had some beautiful lanterns to take home for halloween decorations.

We left the spider and tree spirits to the woods – if you visit in the next few weeks feel free to take photos and send them to us so we can see how long they survive. In past years they continued to dwell in the space for at least a month!