Artist Research
I did some research on a few different British artists to gain inspiration for workshop ideas at the school. The artists I looked at were Bridget Riley, Chris Ofili, Anish Kapoor, Yinka Shonibare and poet John Agard. Below is some of the research I did of them, with the writing coming from various articles and websites on the internet.

Bridget Riley is quite a well-known British artist who created dizzying "Op-art" pieces that play tricks on the viewers eyes. I thought she would be an interesting artist to look at as her art is quite accessible  yet still interesting. A nice idea would be to create simple optical illusion pieces which would likely be something the children haven't done before and be a nice fun challenge.

Chris Ofili is a well-known English artist and has a distinctive style uses many bright colours and lots of materials such as paint, glitter and collage. These are all playful and fun materials to work with and we could definitely use these with the crescent students. A lot of his work has strong links to culture, which means he would be a nice artist to potentially talk to the students about.

Yinka Shonibare is a British-Nigerian artist who's work often focuses on race and class and the perceived meaning of culture and nationality. The mediums he works in includes painting, sculpture, photography and film. His sculpture above was something I liked a lot. 

Anish Kapoor is a British-Indian sculptor and one of the most influential sculptors of his generation. His work is very minimalistic and conceptual and I think he would be an interesting artists for the primary school students to learn about. As his work has a lot of simple shapes we could also do an activity where the children try and make small scale versions of his sculptures using simple materials like clay and plasticine, which could even be painted when dry. 

John Agard is a poet, playwright, short story and children's writer. Below is one of his poems called "half-caste" which breaks down the outdated term. I thought he would be interesting to potentially look at as the children might want to incorporate words or phrases into their work, and different dialects and famous British sayings could be explored. 

Tony Cragg is a British sculptor and one of the world's foremost sculptors. He works with many materials such as stone, wood, glass, stainless steel, aluminium, cast bronze and cast iron, and found objects, from plastic consumer goods to rubbish from the streets. Some of his works that interested me in particular were the found objects pieces, which I found really innovative and environmentally friendly. I think it would be really fun to do a workshop with the kids where we give them random recyclables and have them create artwork from it.

14/06/16-16/06/16

These are emails I sent to Matthew to schedule a meeting on Tuesday at our school and do a small activity with some of the children from the Crescent Primary School.  

14/06/16 

I watched a video titled "turning the world inside out" which went into depth on the subject of outsider art. This type of art is unique,  created by people outside a movement, largely self taught artists and also artists that have disabilities.The video looked at outsider artists from all over world, looking at artists in Japan, Austria, Venice and America to name a few, all focused on different mediums and with distinct styles. One American artist that I found interesting was William Scott, who makes paintings and posters that reinvent his life in the 1970s . The video was very informative and interesting and gave some insight into expanding our way of collaborating with our community partner. A potential way to use these concepts is to leave the Crescent students to draw from their imagination initially and experiment with all kinds of art. The outsider don't really feel the need or pressure to conform to the dominant art movement of the time, meaning they produce work that is unlike what most artists are creating around them.

These are notes I made while watching the video, writing about some of the artists I really liked.  

14/06/16

I looked at two collective groups, Assemble studio and Foreground. Assemble Studio does art based community projects and won the 2015 turner prize for their work. Foreground is based in Frome, Somerset. They commission temporary and permanent artworks and do interesting art projects in Somerset. Below I have put the about section of both of their websites which has a bit of information about them and what they do.

Spirit of Play

The Spirit of Play project that Assemble studio runs is a current collaborative research project that revolves around the development of a new play offer at National Trust Bristol’s SSSI historical woodland, Leigh Woods.

Assemble are working closely with the National Trust’s ecology and engagement rangers, and they have run three active, on site research weekends led by children,  observing and learning from the way children use the woods and how their activity affects the delicate ecology. Assemble states "Spirit of Play aims to uncover and champion the existing playful opportunities within the NT’s Leigh Wood". This project is interesting in that it places the focus more on the children's contribution and actions rather than a more structured project teaching the children something. It presents a nice way to get young people engaged with the community by letting their actions be the main focus and by connecting them to a local area, in this case the woods. I think this is a clever way to do research and think that the format of the project is quite effective. This project's principles could be applied to ours by having the Crescent primary school children choose and create their own tools by going outside and using found objects to make artwork, then they would be starting their own exploration of art and its potential. We could also do something similar by giving them a wide variety of materials and seeing which ones they like the most and why. One thing that could be changed from this project is the presentation, the spirit of play project was meant to be about exploring and research however our project is focused more on workshop learning and skills based activities, which means it might not be best to do too many activities. We could focus on one or two instead to make it more focused which would be a bit different to the spirit of play. 

Intervention/Decoration 
This community project by foreground brought together a group of internationally acclaimed and also up and coming artists to focus on the topic of "intervention/decoration" and encouraged them to look at the social and physical elements of the market town Frome in Somerset where Foreground is based. An exhibition for project was held in many different areas around the town, with artwork inspired by the social, industrial and architectural aspects transforming neglected buildings, cultural venues and bringing life to public spaces. Foreground describes the concept behind the project in depth on their website stating:
"The decorative has, for many, become pejorative when applied to visual art, whilst the term intervention has maintained a radical rhetoric, suggesting unsanctioned activity and ruptures in the norm, despite it’s vulnerability to cliché. Instead of maintaining this polarity, Intervention/Decoration presented new commissions by artists whose works all complicate the distinction between what can be considered an intervention in public space and what might be considered a gesture of decoration or ornamentation."

I found this project very creative in the way it revitalised Frome, placing art directly onto buildings in a way that contrasted massively yet was a striking way to give life to old buildings without simply knocking them down and replacing them with new ones. The decorative pattern itself is quite traditional, which makes it appear to blend in really well with its surroundings. I think this is particularly effective as it integrates art into the community in a way that initially seems quite jarring but actually fits in nicely with the surrounding area. This approach leaves a lasting impact for the community as they get to see how to creatively enrich their town and also keep a piece of the project with them. Leaving some kind of legacy in our community project would be a great way to create a lasting impact and inspire the primary school to continue with art projects like these, as well as leave a reminder of what the students have achieved and understood through our workshops. To do this we could make a physical piece of work that the school could keep and hang up or make an educational pack so that the school could recreate the workshops when we're gone.

These are a few notes I made from looking at some of the projects Assemble Studio and Foreground.

10/06/16

Following on from our first visit to the school we made some mind-maps based on the concept of British values, as this was the focus of the school's art week. Initially we had difficulty coming up with topics to branch out from. Even though we found out that Year 3 are doing printing inspired by sporting logos and the 2012 olympics, and Year 4 are doing work inspired by the Beatles' Sgt Peppers lonely hearts club album cover, we thought we could choose a different thing to focus on to expand the children's understanding of British values rather than redoing subjects they've already done at school. This way our work would tie in with what the children are doing with art while also providing a different perspective. We chose to branch out from the topics of cultural diversity, London and British artists.

We found out many of the children at the primary school have English as a second language and from living in Croydon I know that the surrounding area of Selhurst and Croydon has a lot of racial and ethnic diversity. From this we concluded that there is likely a lot of diversity in the school and quite a few different cultures. We tried to come up with various different things related to different cultures, artists and areas in London with high diversity. This helped inform our ideas for workshops such as using spices and seeds to make pictures. 

We looked at the city of London,  and the key monuments there, for inspiration on the types of places to bring up or focus on in our workshops. London is a huge capital and cultural centre of the world and we live in it so it made sense to try and derive inspiration from the city. In addition we noted areas that are quite interesting like Brixton and Southbank. People from our group wrote down the areas of London they live in as well and it created a nice picture of significant places that are popular destinations for Londoners that the students may not have visited or heard of before. 

We also looked at notable British artists such as Grayson Perry and Chris Ofili, to get an idea of some artists we could tell the students about or do more in depth research about to find ideas for workshops. It would be interesting to look at British artists that have heritage from other countries to see how their culture comes through in their work. 

14/06/16
It has been a week since we begun our project and needed to take time to monitor our progress since the start of the community project. As a group we filled out a sheet talking about some of the obstacles we faced so far and discussing where we are at. The sheet is mainly focused on obstacles and issues we've faced so far. We haven't had too many difficulties so far, mostly just the fact that we couldn't proceed without meeting our community partner and exchanging ideas and concepts. We overcame these barriers by preparing questions to get a better understanding of what we can do in our project and created mind maps to brainstorm. Some themes/issues that surround our project have to do with the fact that we are working with primary school students, so they will likely have a low attention span and some of the children might have additional educational needs. We also found out that some children don't have english as a first language but this shouldn't really be an issue as they all speak english regardless. This affects our workshops in such a way that we would need to keep them short and we need to have fun and interactive activities to keep the children interested over a period of time, which means shaping it so that it appeals to children and what they want to do. This means spending more time making artwork and being active rather than us sitting and talking at them for a long time and asking them what they did and didn't like to improve the activities we do.

10/06/16
These are all the pictures we took of the crescent school and our meeting on Friday.
The first visit to the Crescent Primary School was nice, the school was very modern as it has only be around for a few years and it was very expansive and colourful. Our group really liked the atmosphere of the school and our meeting was productive and informative, and the teacher seemed very open to different ideas which was encouraging. After our visit the group split up and did separate research.