Playing Seriously

In our first session back at Merton Park Primary school we began to explore ideas around building, structures and machinery.

I have been interested the idea of ‘serious play’ for a while in the work that I do; that is playing with ideas or materials with a purpose. Many others who deal with creativity in education would share this notion in a world increasingly pressurising children to achieve results and hit targets in a  standardised way. If you are interested in this you may want to follow the thread through an article I recently wrote for NSEAD (National Society for Education in art and design) The Seriousness of Play.

I digress…

We began our session with a drawing exercise based on the game Chinese Whispers.

Each child was given an object small enough to fit in the palm of their hand, and was asked to draw in secret on a small square of paper. Looking at every mark, line and shape they saw. We used things from my tool box this week to fit in the idea of machines.

We could draw from every angle, with pen and pencil.

This made us look very closely and concentrate hard.

We then collected the objects and sat in a circle. We passed our drawing around and copied our neighbours, exactly as we saw it.

This was harder we thought as we didn’t have the original object to look at, but it was faster to do.

we carried on passing drawings on until we had 4 drawings each.

We then tried to guess which object we had. It wasn’t always obvious.

Lastly we matched all the drawings to their original object and talked about how the drawings changed as they were passed on.

The drawing of the drawing of the drawing of the object!

We then watched a film of two artists, Fischili and Weiss who made a work called.

‘The way things go’  You can watch it here.

We then selected 4 items from a table full of junk objects.

We played with them and added to them to make precarious structures, that would just stand still, and look interesting.

There was lots of bangs and clatters as we experimented. When we were happy we made a large charcoal drawing of our structure.

Then photographed it with a white sheet as a backdrop.

We talked about what we found difficult and what we liked about each sculpture.

Here we liked the sandwich made by the bottle and its lid!

Here we liked the man with the top hat.

We also liked the way objects were layered inside each other.

We decided we would like to try and make them move next week!

I would like to thank Henry Ward, Access Art and Welling School’s publication AE5 for sharing the ideas that helped in the development of this session.