2.2 Making a Mini Art Trail

After spending last week coming up with lots of ideas for an amazing art trail, we wanted to test out what its like to make one. Today we worked in four groups each quickly designing, making and installing a prototype art trail, before then swapping with another group and seeing what it was like to follow someone else's.

We started the afternoon session by discussing as a class the themes and ideas that had emerged from the previous work. We decided to take four ideas forward, with each group working on one. We looked at: turning prominent buildings into characters, animals, making model buildings and structures, and creating trails from words, messages and questions.

Each group went out to look for a good route, starting from the classroom and leading to a relevant place in the school. For example, the group looking at animals ran their trail to the chicken house in the playground. We then decided each person was to make one art piece to place along the trail. Some of the pieces would give clear direction to follow, while others where activities or responses to specific locations.

Everyone then made their prototype art pieces from scrap materials. We did this quickly but paid attention to how to join different materials,  sometimes using staples for speed, and using wooden sticks to keep paper and fabric elements upright and stable. Once complete, the groups went out along their trails once more to install the work, before returning to the classroom and giving instructions to an other group for what to look out for. Everyone then went out again to follow a trail!

It was exciting to go around the school seeing all these little new arty things everywhere. The groups quickly found the trails and followed them collecting up the art pieces as they went. When we returned to classroom we finished the session by discussing the experience and its positives and negatives. Key points were that a trail would be more fun if it was longer and perhaps more complicated to follow, as well as how good it was that the whole session had allowed the groups to build up a team feeling and it was then fun to go out as a team following the trails. We thought that it would be good to develop art work for the real trail that allowed a similar group feeling to develop, although we were unsure what that might entail!

Right at the end of the session we quickly discussed the planned walk and how it will be useful to look for places to put art and inspiration to use in making it.

[more photos coming soon]



[more text and images coming soon]