Getting in the Way

We’ve been designing the drawing and writing activities for our latest project, a kids' activity guide for Trinity Buoy Wharf. One of our ideas was to feature David Snoo Wilson’s Slugmarines – strange squat like creatures, cast from reclaimed raw materials such as old metal gas canisters.

The idea was that we provide a shape featuring an abstracted outline of the original, and invite a response in the form of an addition, an amendement, an embellishment to pull it out of that original function, and to give it a personality, a different kind of presence, in the way that Snoo Wilson has with his bronze cast works.

The problem was that the sculptures themselves had been temporarily reclocated from their positions on the wharf because ‘they were getting in the way’, and so we moved on from the idea of featuring them in our guide.

Thinking about that later, it seemed an interesting way of putting it. Doesn’t some of the very best art ‘get in the way’? Perhaps not literally, but in a metaphorical sense art has the capacity to cause a disturbance, to disrupt the familiar. It can extend the limits of our imagination, show us something we’d not seen before, whether something completely different or subtly reconfigure something that, until that point, had seemed static or fixed. In short, art can ‘get in the way’.

It’s probably not what was meant when we were told that the Slugmarines were getting in the way, but in this case the literal also seemed to resonate as the metaphorical.

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Discoveries Along the Way at Two Temple Place

Last weekend we visited the Discoveries exhibition and watched young visitors engage with our activity sheets for the first time. Children sat on the floor and drew their own ‘Wanted Poster’ ideas right next to the display of gold coins from the Pembroke Hoard, found hidden inside Pembroke College, Cambridge. Kids filled their ‘Keeping and Collecting’ pages with drawings of imagined collections of Lego, teeth, sea shells and even heads!

I was reminded of a feather collection I had as a child. It was made up of many types of feathers: broad and white from sea gulls, tiny and fluffy from small unnamed birds, grimy and grey from city pigeons, and oneshimmering blue spear from a giant macaw parrot. My feather collection represented a sample of the birds where I lived, but perhaps it was also a reflection of my interest in a realm just beyond my reach. The feathers left a trail for me to follow, traces of life elsewhere: up in the sky, above in the trees, or out over the sea.

I hope kids visiting the Discoveries exhibition will be able to spend time imagining the worlds represented by the objects on display; and in doing so become aware of experiences beyond their immediate reach. That is what it is to be an explorer. The discoveries are things you pick up along the way.

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