Throughout the months of June and July, we ran workshops with one of our closest partnered school Heald Place Primary. Each Tuesday, Year 5’s came back to the gallery to explore the topic of ‘safe spaces’ with artist Bukky Baldwin. The intention was to gain an understanding of what feels comforting to a child in today’s world with the outcome being materials, objects and props that will feature in a new resource this coming Autumn ‘Boxes of Creativity’ in our School of Creativity space.

The sessions, situated in both our Clore Garden Studio and Art Garden, had both Bukky and teacher Lucette Henderson delivering 4 weeks of workshops starting simply by having the children reacquainted with our spaces in and around the park. With some of the best icebreaker games I’ve ever seen (much fun had) Bukky shared her artistic practice with the children before highlighting some examples of safe spaces that artists have used for inspiration. Bukky then led a tour of the park to observe things that are comforting including sounds, textures and smells before finishing the first week with a drawing activity where the Year 5’s shared their own safe spaces to visualise ideas.

Week 2 (and more luck with sunshine) was led by Lucette as we examined safe spaces in our minds setting questions such as ‘it’s been a really busy day at school, where do you go to relax once home?’ and ‘What do you do and why is it comforting?’ this followed a meditation session with the children sat in a circle in the very green art garden. We ended the workshop by probing what a dream place could be to collaborate and working in teams, the children started to compile a comfort list.

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By week three (and still sunny) the children were running with the project. Sharing ideas and making drawings and diagrams, we covered our glass doors with work and contributions to what our boxes could look like. Some tapped into nature suggesting a box to be filled with natural resources inspired by trees and animals, some ideas came from gaming culture and content creation and others were inspired by local eating and dessert establishments from Rusholme.

By week 4 (and this time the sun dance didn’t work but it didn’t matter!) We got to grips with building and some construction. From individual models of what a safe space could look like to experimenting with a wide array of materials and resources. The creativity on show was incredible. We had TeePees, dens and other weird and very wonderful constructs decorated with fabrics of all colours. It was a fantastic way to end the project and a joy to have children back with us to play, collaborate and have fun.

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Thanks so much for the session last week – this has been a great project! So pacey, engaging, fun, inspiring , energetic….thanks so much for all your hard work in putting the workshops together for us, we really appreciate it. It’s felt very unique and that we’ve made it work out! 

I just wanted to say a huge thankyou from us for the lovely Box Of Creativity project with you both. Such fun and the children enjoyed it so much. 

Huge thank you to Heald Place Primary and their teacher Lucette Henderson for their commitment, spirit and application and to Bukky Baldwin who led such imaginative workshops which were wonderful.

Stay tuned to see what we put in our Boxes of Creativity after summer!