Turner Prize winning artists join forces to help kids in East stay entertained

Anglia
Essex
And Finally
Monday 13 April 2020 at 12:23pm

Firstsite gallery in Colchester is used to encouraging young people to get creative, especially during the school holidays but unable to welcome kids through its doors, it still wanted to do something to challenge imaginations with some family fun.

So the gallery has teamed up with some Turner Prize winning artists- including Anthony Gormley and Mark Wallinger to create activity packs for the kids during lockdown.

Named, 'Art is where the home is', the first pack contains 12 activities, designed by 12 different artists, each with guidelines on how to get started. One of them is artist Bob and Roberta Smith's 'Laying the table for life', which involves making a tree all over your kitchen table. Loo roll is involved in a few of the ideas or another idea is Mark Wallinger's 'Wave'.

Credit: ITV News Anglia

'I've called it Wave. I found myself looking at cave paintings, and there's those images of hands in which they've obviously used their own hands as a sort of stencil to pigment around and just the immediacy of that gesture, suddenly, all the way across the generations. And a wave is one of the first things you learn as a child. I remember going over the railway footbridge to wave at the train drivers and if I got a wave back that seemed a sort of magic! And of course, ironically, it's all about touch and contact and all of those things we can't do it at the moment. People can use their own hand to trace around and then look at the palm of the other hand to fill in the detail. Then I suggest people may put them in their windows as a gesture, contact and solidarity with everyone outside who may be on a walk or on the way to a supermarket.'

Credit: ITV News Anglia

Firstsite hope when all of this is over, they can display some of the children's creations in an exhibition but until then, the gallery is encouraging everyone to share their efforts on social media.

The first 'Art is where the home is' pack is available to download from the Firstsite website when you sign up to the mailing list. The second one is out soon with contributions from Essex artist Grayson Perry.