Photo credit: Florence Acland
I co-led weeklong summer Art Camps at Abbot Hall Art Gallery in 2016, 2017, and 2018. Every year, Art Camp ended with an art show on the final day, for friends and family to come and see. This celebrated the work they'd done and gave children a chance to reflect on their experience by writing text labels and sharing their work with other people.
One of the activities I developed in 2017 was making giant vases inspired by the Winnifred Nicholson's exhibition at Abbot Hall. We started by sketching flowers in the art gallery. Then we painted vases and created larger than life flowers out of sheets of plastic and other outdoor materials. The vases stayed at Abbot Hall over the course of the summer to enliven the front lawn during the Winnifred Nicholson exhibition.
In the following summer of 2017, Abbot Hall's Art Camp was awarded the North West of England Big Impact Award by Curious Minds. I co-delivered this program in partnership with the Cumbria Museum Consortium (CMC), and children travelled to CMC venues for art activities.
In 2018 I helped run two week-long art camps at Abbot Hall Art Gallery. The program was becoming over-subscribed and we began repeating it to allow more children to participate. We found as a team that once activities were developed, it was easy to repeat them.