Out and About with the Ghost Signs of Stoke Newington Trail

January 24, 2016

Our 'Ghostsigns of Stoke Newington Trail', commissioned as part of the Stoke Newington Heritage Mural Project - a community arts project that will unfold during the course of 2016, and culminating in Summer 2016 with the production of an original mural, on the big wall that over looks William Patten Primary School and Stoke Newington Church Street.

Here are some pictures we took having fun on our Ghostsigns of Stoke Newington Trail, commissioned as part of the Stoke Newington Heritage Mural Project, 2015.

With thanks to Sam Roberts of Ghostsign Tours for his guidance, knowledge and inspiration.

Reality Check

January 13, 2016

“Mums and dads are very great

But not when they drag you to the Tate”

- by Ruby Robinson, aged 8

We love how this poem by the daughter of an artist friend cuts to the chase!

At White Wall Yellow Door, we’re here to solve this kind of problem.

Getting in the Way

January 13, 2016

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.

A visit to The Freud Museum London

January 13, 2016

We had a lovely visit to the newly refurbished Anna Freud room at The Freud Museum last weekend. Along with a few younger visitors we had invited along, we got a chance to explore old treasures alongside Bettina Von Zwhel's intriguing new photographic frieze. For the kids, the morning was full of thoughtful exploration, and a bit of sneaking around to gather observations of the adults.

Here are some of photos from the visit: from Bettina's installation piece, to Anna Freud's elegant typewriter.

We hope many more young people will visit in the coming weeks!

Discoveries Along the Way at Two Temple Place

January 13, 2016

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.

Moon rock, with fingerprints

January 13, 2016

I asked them to choose between the Science Museum and the Tower of London. Edie was insistent; it had to be the Science Museum. She’d been there with her class a few weeks before, and there was something she wanted the rest of us to see; a real piece of the actual moon.

We couldn’t find the piece of moon to begin with, and by the time we did, we had stopped looking. And then suddenly, there it was. Not surrounded by the usual funneling crowd, on its own, quietly inauspicious.

We are looking at a creamy grey piece of rock about the size of a fist, its rough texture glistening in the spotlight. I try to connect what we see with what is written on the information panel. I feel should be moved by what is before us - connected in some way to some big universal truth, a dawning sense of the incredible un-endingness of the space-time continuum…

"This piece of Moon rock was cut from the ‘Great Scott’ rock that Apollo 15 astronaut David Scott picked from the Moon’s surface in August 1971. The rock is made of olivine basalt and was part of an ancient lava flow, formed billions of years earlier when single-celled life had barely begun on Earth."

There are several layers of glass separating us from the fragment of rock – it’s held upright by a metal clamp with white rubber tips and is encased in a triangular prism container that’s filled with nitrogen ‘so that so that it never comes into contact with the Earth’s atmosphere’. This seems sad, so remote…

‘It would blow up if it came into contact with the earth’s air’ Edie says all of a sudden.

But it seems so inert

We press our hands against the glass as we look, and our fingerprints add to the marks already smeared onto it. And now I’m not looking at the rock, I’m looking at the glass, the fingerprints, blurred traces of the people who were here before us. The marks were made inadvertently of course, and they are meant to be invisible, a completely unintentional aspect of the museum experience, to be wiped away at the end of each day.

I thought about that sense of un-conectedness and suddenly those marks felt important; the physical trace of the visitors, the small, insignificant gestures each of us makes as we engage with an exhibit, each mark a microsite; mapping in its own way a unique and personal encounter.

I tried to explain this to Edie as we walked away, her questioning why I’d been trying to take a picture of the fingerprints as well as the rock.

‘Mum,’ she said, ‘you’re crazy’…