A free creative workshop for 7-13 year olds led by artists Lucie Smith and Alex Sutherland, inspired by the Avebury Papers project.
Southampton City Art Gallery is hosting a Junior Art School workshop on Friday 21 August, run by local artists Lucie Smith and Alex Sutherland. It's for 7 to 13 year olds, and it's part of The Avebury Papers, an exhibition currently showing at the gallery.
The session is entirely hands-on. The kids start by discovering how lichen grows on stone and make mono prints using Gelli plates. From there, they build textured landscape collages using those prints, natural rubbings, and colourful papers to reimagine the stones, hills, trees, and sheep of the landscape. They also grind chalk, clay, and fruit to make their own natural paints, so they're working with raw materials rather than just picking up a brush.
It all ties back to The Avebury Papers, a four-year UKRI-funded project to digitise, explore, and share the multimedia archive of Avebury's Neolithic origins. To encourage creative reuse of that archive, the project commissioned artists Gayle Chong Kwan and Kialy Tihngang to respond to the material. Their work is on display in the gallery: Oneiric Archaeologies reimagines the stone circle as a surreal dreamscape, while The Bluest Eye draws on the theory that Avebury's circles commemorated the domestic dwellings of early farmers who migrated to southern England some 5,800 years ago. The workshop takes that same idea — looking at the archive and making something new from it — and puts it in the hands of the kids.
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It runs from 10.30am to 3.30pm at the gallery on Commercial Road, so it's a full day's session. It's free, though a fully refundable £15 deposit is required to secure a place, which is returned when they attend.
