‘A Place to Call Home’: A Collaborative Art Project

On Tuesday 22 March, Year 5 pupils visited their collaborative ‘A Place to Call Home’ exhibition at Southside Shopping Centre, Wandsworth.

Year 5 pupil Krish describes the event:

“This was a collaboration across Wandsworth with fifty other schools taking part. Each school brought something new to the table, whether it was self-portraits or even Covid particles with words on them that students thought described home (this was our idea; pretty cool right?). This exhibition brought a sense of community and hope as we emerge from this global pandemic – we’re all affected by this and we’re in this together. For me, it highlights how we have stuck together through the toughest of times and shown resilience.

We were inspired by Miss Sophie Potter who painted Covid particles and we were allowed the artistic licence to put our own spin on them. I was blown away by the artwork on display and as soon as we were allowed to look around, we all rushed to find our panel. It was a scramble, to say the least, as everybody was super excited. Our facilitator gave us all sheets and we were split into groups with one group per panel. We were told to draw a picture of one of the artworks on the panels’ and answer a few questions based on our chosen piece. I chose a self-portrait of a boy who I thought went into amazing detail with his mark-making and his use of cross hatching. We all gathered back up again and this time the facilitator gave us a soundscape to ‘watch’ or should I say listen to. A soundscape is a video recording of lots of different sounds that you want to hear, it sometimes makes you feel you want to be where these sounds have taken place. This was interesting as lots of us said we ‘saw’ something even though we did not see anything! This to me highlights the power of sound and how you can visualise things with sound in more detail – two senses are better than one.

Finally, we were split into groups again and created some self-portraits and put our favourite things around us. Overall, this was a really fun trip, and it was so good to work as a team with 50 other schools, and I hope we can all do more things like this in the future.”