In Winter 2023/2024, I coordinated and managed a project linking two Ealing primary schools with Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery’s exhibition, Idris Khan & Annie Morris: When Loss Makes Melodies.
About
Soft Colours is a display of artwork created by Year 5 students at Christ the Saviour Primary School in Ealing Broadway and Year 6 students at Tudor Primary School in Southall. These students worked collaboratively within their classes over the Autumn 2023 term with two of Pitzhanger’s artist practitioners, Emily Hopkins and Lucia Ferguson. The project responded to Idris Khan & Annie Morris: When Loss Makes Melodies, an exhibition exploring the themes of emotion, time, and memory which ran from 4 October 2023 to 7 January 2024.
The practitioners planned a series of three workshops for each class to develop the work. In the first workshop, the students explored themes including culture, identity, collaboration, and inclusion, writing manifestos on the question: “How can we collaborate in an inclusive way?” They then created visual symbols to represent their key ideas and words from the manifestos, using these to explore the materials and processes used by the artists, Idris Khan and Annie Morris, including text-layering exercises inspired by Khan and fabric decoration exercises inspired by Morris.
In the final stage, the participating classes visited Pitzhanger for a guided tour of the exhibition and their final workshop, where they created the work that you see today. In small groups, the students worked together to first choose a coloured fabric and then decorate it using oil pastels, drawing from their earlier manifestos, layering text and images onto the physical fabric. They then stuffed newspaper into the fabric to create abstract shapes. Many of these soft sculptures resemble strings of beads or sausages – can you see any other shapes in the work? Can you interpret the themes and ideas that the children explored by how they decorated the fabric?
The final product is inspired by Annie Morris’ stunning Stacks, her assemblages of precariously stacked, vibrantly coloured plaster orbs. The work is presented alongside a film by Emile Ebrahim Kelly, documenting the school project at Pitzhanger and the reflections of the student artists.
Nathan Marsh 