28/04/2008 by James.

Last week I worked with groups of 4 to 5 year old children at St Josephs School in Poole, as a follow up to their visit to the Jurassic Coast and the Dorchester Museum.

The children had been working on a theme of dinosaur teeth and bones, and other fossils.

We started with rubbings and drawings to explore local patterns and textures from the school garden, and then used natural objects with clay and plaster, to make impressions and cast from them; processes that would help the children to begin to understand fossilisation through making.

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22/04/2008 by James.

Today we walked around the village, stopping to explore walls, snails, drains and ditches, mud, and a horse - encouraging the children to use all their senses and giving them chance to translate the learning from and interest in tubes/pipes and inside/outside spaces into the context of the real world.

Coversations grew up around the snails sheltering in a drain pipe and the path of a drainage channel that ran alongside the road, and individual children used their bodies to follow routes mapped out by landscape features such as kerbs, gravel patches and dry ditches, noting the sounds and textures that they found along the way, and recording their finds with cameras.

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21/04/2008 by James.

… its been a bit quiet on the blog as I have been setting up a new initiative called ‘Creative Ecology’ (www.creative-ecology.co.uk).

I have set up Creative Ecology to deliver a programme of participatory arts projects and training/consultancy, that supports people in exploring their identity and developing greater environmental awareness, in a hands-on, creative way.

I will continue to work in partnership with schools, community and environmental organisations, and other artists, to set up these opportunities and to share our work to a wider audience through training events etc.

I am back working on 5×5x5 tomorrow, so there will be some more news and photos on the children’s explorations around the village of Pitton later this week.

I am also in Poole for a couple of days later this week, working with reception-age children to explore pattern and texture through rubbings, clay impressions and casting of their local outside space; linking to their recent visit to the Jurassic Coast and theme of fossilisation and dinosaur teeth!

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09/04/2008 by James.

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04/04/2008 by James.

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02/04/2008 by James.

I have recently started to look back at older work that aimed to be more direct and rich in its documentation and evocation of sensory experience… to try and give others a sense of what I experience in a certain setting as directly as possible, through work that is both made there and is of there.

These pages that link found objects and materials with words, as thoughts and descriptions of my experience as it happens, were an important part of my work during my degree over 10 years ago.

(irish and australian diaries - 1996 to 1997)

Through recent work on 5×5x5 and other projects I have come to recognise more fully the value of this kind of creative investigation and recording; as a way of facilitating the development of a more direct awareness of the embedded nature of an individual (me) within their surroundings, and as an opportunity to share something of that state of awareness - that richly layered and interconnected reality - through the resulting artwork.

I am hoping to take this type of work to a new level, exploring different media as ‘the page’ and so continuing to merge the ‘natural’ and man-made/recycled. I also plan to make work of varying scale with correspondingly large/small scales of bodily action, and document my experience of a variety of settings, both ‘rural’ and ‘urban’.

(exploring Savernake forest - 2nd April 2008 (detail))

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