Showzine Workshop with Charles Edward Brooke School.....

Today I would like to share with you the Showzine workshop I led last Thursday with pupils from Charles Edward Brooke School in Camberwell, held at the Royal College of Art! Here's a picture of the lovely ladies:

The workshop was put on by ReachOutRCA as part of their series of Showzine workshops with participants from London secondary schools. These workshops were devised to run alongside this year's SHOW RCA, the Summer graduate show.

During the morning session I showed the girls my work and then it was their task to make a decorative object, including making an exhibition label and a sketch of their piece. The girls listened very patiently whilst I introduced them to my practice and they asked some very good questions! They were very enthusiastic about using the driftwood I had brought to make objects, with the scoobies proving a very popular choice of material! Here are the girls choosing their materials and the wood piece that they wanted to work with:

Unfortunately I can't take my pillar drill to workshops so I was drilling by hand with an electric drill, which proved a task! I had initially told the girls not to make a design with more than 6 holes per piece, but this kept getting more and more expanded as their ideas became more ambitious! Here are two of the girls planning where they wanted their holes to go:

The drilling seemed to take far too long to get through everyone's pieces (and my shoulder was definitely feeling the pain!). After the drilling came decision-making in regards to colours, materials and amounts:

The girls did a lovely job at constructing their pieces, putting a lot of effort into what they were making and here are some very focussed faces to prove it:

It was all worth the patience and dedication as the girls' objects were really lovely, especially considering the short amount of time they had to make them! Plus, they all came up with very different designs. The girls were understandably a little shy about getting their photographs taken with their objects, but some were brave enough and the results are really great:

 (This photo makes me laugh!)

(This was by far the most complex design to drill!) 

 Their teachers even got into the spirit and took part too!:

During the afternoon session the girls looked at the work of Alkesh Parmar who graduated this Summer from Goldsmithing, Silversmithing, Jewellery and Metalwork. His work was amazing in the show so it was great for me to be able to meet and chat with him briefly before he spoke with the girls.

*Images care of Michele Panzeri