School Sculptures

We’ve divided school sculptures into 3 catagories – big steel sculptures – which might have mosaic and concrete elements (which will be seen under mosaic), Mosaic, ceramic and cement sculptures, and other sculptures, which includes images of consultation, voting and workshops . We haven’t included descriptions of each project individually, because, although each sculpture is discreet, the way we work is the same, depending of a few deciding factors:

Firstly where the school want the children to be very hands-on - this means that we can't use welding etc (although Pete did once hire a container to weld in, so the children could watch) - so this means a medium like mosaic or ceramic.

The advantage of this method is that the pupils make the sculpture - but it is very time consuming, lots has to happen ‘off-site’ (ie in our workshops) and is therefore expensive.

Secondly where the school wants a metal sculpture - in this case we do workshops in the school so that the children can get ideas for the possible design of the sculpture. Very often we have a vote at this stage - we get the whole school to vote for the model they like the best, and this is the one made full size. 

Alternatively, we work with a small group of children, or parents, and synthesize the large number of models into, say, 4 themes, and make models using elements from the originals. These (usually larger) models are then exhibited and a vote is held - and the one with the most votes wins.

This is a method we have used a lot - and it works - everyone seems to understand the democracy of the process.

Sometimes we have a combination of the 2 – where there is a big sculpture, which the school community has voted for, and there are elements which pupils can make within the sculpture – such as leaves for a tree, mosaic or concrete slabs for the plinth.

Whichever method is appropriate for each school, the important thing, we feel, is that the whole school community feels involved, and that they feel the resultant sculpture is THEIRS – done with not done to.

And always, the starting place is research – asking questions to get ideas and synthesising them. In some schools the topic is given – ie one school wanted a WWll sculpture, but not one that glorified war, so we got some veterans to come and talk to the children, and we made our workshops in school so that the children thought about the other side of a war – any war, and hence we ended up with a woman hiding under the table with her cat during a bombing raid. Another school’s research came up with an amazing story about a bomber pilot who saved the school rather than himself by not jumping out of his stricken plane and guiding it away, otherwise it would have hit the school– his name was Dudley Snooke and that sculpture shows that story.  But some schools are open minded, and the children come up with ideas and themes which we vote on.