Back in May, we launched the newest Creative Toolbox project, with sixteen new young people joining us alongside five returning peer mentors.
The group arrived with budding curiosity, eager to meet each other and play. It was exciting to see a new wave of energy enter Creative Toolbox at our Welcome Session.
This year, we partnered with Wonder Fools Theatre Company on their Positive Stories For Negative Times project. They co-commission playwrights to create work for young people to engage them with the process of making theatre. We were among multiple youth groups and schools across the region taking part. We selected “Mrs Campbell’s Class Fifth Period”, written by Leyla Josephine, and used it as a stimulus to develop each creative workshop. It’s been a really interesting process using the script’s themes and characters and discussing how we can use these within different art forms.
Here’s some more on what we got up to in each session:
✍️ Creative Writing
This was led by myself, and was a perfect opportunity to really get to know our new participants. We played some word games to get our brains warmed up before using music as inspiration for writing poetry. For me, poetry, is a really important tool for creative expression. I’m aware that many young people have some preconceptions with poetry having learned sets of rules for each “type” of poem. I take away the ‘rules’ and instead give them space to ‘play’ when writing poetry.
After some time of free writing poetry, we turned to the characters of the play. We had some good chats about who they were and what they liked & disliked, their dreams and fears and what their relationships and place within the play. These discussions led us to creating group I AM poem, forming wealthy character descriptions that we could come back to.
Once we had got to know the characters a little better, the group then made their own character booklets to develop these characters even further. Some created diaries and others created an almost encyclopedia. This was a really fun and accessible introduction to developing and understanding characters.
🎨 Illustration & Screen Printing
Our Toolboxers had two amazing sessions with the extremely talented Alice Griffin. The group started with some mindful drawing getting to grips with ink and different utensils to draw with such as sticks, moss, feathers and lots of other materials. It was a brilliant way to see how textures and marks can be applied.
The group then had the chance to create collage pieces. Everyone chose a quote or scene that stood out to them and using ink, paints and different collage material, they made individual pieces to visualise this. We had a mulitiude of fantastic pieces that demonstrated quotes such as “Transcending” and “Face like a tuna baguette”. Each piece was uniquely creative and spoke to their perspective of what their chosen quote meant to them.
Before our screenprinting workshop, Alice asked the group took out for fonts and signs that looked interesting to them. These were then used to create our very own Creative Toolbox alphabet, which was very cool!
We talked about what school means to the group, what they like and dislike about the education system. As we have quite a few who are home schooled this year, it led to some very interesting and thought-provoking discussions.
In smaller groups, they came up with phrases inspired by these discussions that could be printed and painted onto banners. The results are bold and powerful and show a varied insight into their views and opinions.
🧵 Costume Making
Armed with two massive black bags of old clothes from a vintage shop and lots of haberdashery, the group worked with the brilliant Karen Solly to create upcycled garments. Karen took part in the Art Journal Project last year, so it was a lovely full circle moment to have her as an associate artist with the Creative Toolbox team.
Inspired by their ideas of “uniform” they created some fantastic pieces which really showed off their personalities. We had a layered tie, a beret, a funky blazer, a colourful hoodie/dress which was adourned with fabric from Uganda, and so much more.
The group really got into this session, allowing their creativity to come up some wild and wonderful clothing.
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