SYNOPSIS AND POSITION

Our 2020-24 project ‘Scanathon Dig’ How do you play on this? supported children in using their expert knowledge of activating site through play, combining distinct pedagogic methods deployed in adventure playground spaces with those of a Scanathon; an event where a local community can bring together materials that are related to their shared, current and past experiences of site and place-making. Children from 4 to 11 years who use Adventure Play Hub, an inner-city adventure playground in St. Johns Wood, West London, were supported through a series of 30 creative art workshops and events to devise their own onsite archive and determine a creative approach for embedding the material within their newly refurbished playground site.  

OBJECTIVES AND METHODS

Our 2020-24 project ‘Scanathon Dig’ How do you play on this? supported children in using their expert knowledge of activating site through play, combining distinct pedagogic methods deployed in adventure playground spaces with those of a Scanathon; an event where a local community can bring together materials that are related to their shared, current and past experiences of site and place-making. Children from 4 to 11 years who use Adventure Play Hub, an inner-city adventure playground in St. Johns Wood, West London, were supported through a series of 30 creative art workshops and events to devise their own onsite archive and determine a creative approach for embedding the material within their newly refurbished playground site.  

 Throughout the project we aimed to initiate a space for reintroducing many of the creative art activities, first introduced in the 1970’s that were part of the early playground movement devised by artist play workers who helped build the first adventure playground apparatus and embedded their art school inspired approaches to creative making. Subsequently, due to funding cuts, the loss of creative skill sets, and health and safety protocols, these approaches are no longer provided within the current craft and play activities. Using the lens of adventure play which centres the child to determine both the from and duration of an activity, we aimed to explore how this might inform the restructuring and reframing of a set of creative art workshops that support child centred archiving. We asked what the synergy might be between the use of space, making, play and experiment, that exists within our own art school sculpture school environment and the types of making that children bring into their adventure play. What form of knowledge exchange might be facilitated whilst enacting site-based activities / recordings: drawing, casting, making voids/digging, photography and sewing, alongside more orthodox oral interview recordings to determine what value these hold if any for children. How does site-based play generate modes of presentation, either temporary, semi-permanent or permanent and how do children self-organise to realise and present their play-based work?  

WORKSHOPS AND EVENTS

An invitation from Adventure Play Hub in 2020 to support the children and families to update their onsite mural, first painted in 2006, was used to both frame the workshops and to reactivate how the mural artwork, had originated within adventure playgrounds, more often visualised around a common theme as a space for intergenerational community self-representation. The project realised over 30 workshops, devised to develop a new formation and understanding of the mural; muraling as a call to action, rather than the production of an artefact, putting to work instead the material of the playground site and the activities of play. The, muraling workshops formulated an approach that demystifies the notion of the expert, providing tools that encourage the importance of play as a process that facilitates the archiving activity, to collectively produced non-linear, recursive, visual, tangible, intangible records that break down traditional categories of recording and embody creative making as impetus for child led site-based collective artworks. 

ACTIVITIES

• 30 creative art workshops, devised as time based continuous murals 
• Art-pieces: 
• Permanent site-based art installation comprising of 7 boards 
• Flag 
• Pyro-pen apparatus mural 
• Logo 
• Poster Mural 
• Viewfinders  
• Publication 

FURTHER FUNDING

£10,000  with St.Johns Adventure Play Hub, from Westminster City Council, June 2023 -June2024 grant new funding to create green spaces in the city, (https://www.westminster.gov.uk/news/new-funding-create-green-spaces-city) for a set of More-than-human projects. 

£3,000 with St.Johns Adventure Play Hub, from Westminster City Council, Oct 2022-April 2024, grants ‘Funding Holiday Activities and Food Programme, art activities for 4-16 years, (https://fisd.westminster.gov.uk/kb5/westminster/fis/advice.page?id=qhNVcjh260U) 

OTHER PROJECTS THAT CONNECT 

We have links to the Adventure Play Hub in terms of our case study and we are also hoping to work with Tawny Paul’s Start UP funded Los Angeles Neighborhood Archives Project