In 2015/16 Islington Museum partnered with Morelands Children’s Centre on ‘A Sense of Place’, kindly funded by Islington Giving Supporting Families Programme and the Bunhill Councillors.
Over 5 day long workshops we worked with local families from the King’s Square Estate. Families joined us at Islington Museum for an interactive storytelling session with Dani Bradstreet. In the storytelling sessions we explored our local buildings, transport networks and parks. We pretended to drive the tube, ride historic horse buses, visit local buildings and play in the park with our local guide, Finsbury the fox. There was lots of masking tape, colourful scarves, ‘rain,’ and music involved.
Families then looked at historic images of the local area. They were fascinated to see how the King’s Estate has changed. While many of our older participants were able to share lovely stories about their memories of the local area. We used these images as inspiration for our own drawings.
The adults then used cutting tools to turn the archival images and our drawings into stencils. While the children got messy with play dough, giant drawings, watercolour experiments and printing.
Our project artist Sarah Pimenta worked with families to do mark making on pieces of fabric using tools as varied as leaves, bricks, stamps and hand prints- a particular favourite with the babies!
Sarah then screen printed the stencils on top of the fabric. She was guided by our very enthusiastic helpers!
The resulting printed have been turned into a fabric book telling the story of our local area through art and written memories. To see the beautiful screen prints in this tactile artwork follow this link.
Sarah also took the artworks and re-interpreted them as a digitally printed map of the local area. This beautiful art piece celebrates the creativity of our local families and the things that make our local area special to us. A copy of the map will hang in both Islington Museum and Morelands Children Centre for our family audiences to enjoy.
The exhibition of the artwork was opened on the 5th July 2016 by our artists and the Mayor of Islington. The private view was a success with everyone:
‘This is the best party ever!’
‘What a fabulous event, so wonderful that so many families came to the museum to celebrate our great project!’
‘Really fun, it was lovely to see all the work together and lovely to see everyone again and share memories.’
‘When I told the children this morning, they said, ‘mommy, mommy, let’s go now!”
‘It’s been lovely to come and see all the work, the food was great and nice to meet the Mayor, great she got involved with the kids.’
Friends of Islington Museum 