Art In The Woods
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Jackie Jeffrey describes the benefits of a woodland environment for inner city children, and the art work which has been created.
Transcript
Jackie Jeffrey: I spend a lot of my time based in the city, but I have lots of childhood memories of spending time in the woodlands. As an inner city child, it was wonderful to come out here and see no lights and see stars and animals. I started to work in adventure playgrounds and loved the kind of environments and the opportunities that they provided for children.
Over the years, I've just watched the environments be squeezed and squeezed and squeezed, and the impact that's had on inner city children who have no space to consider an alternative identity.
So I began my doctorate five years ago, and the doctorate was about alternative spaces for transforming learning and identity. I started to think about the concept of learning landscapes.
What we've tried to do is create a community-developed space. There's no funding. We have something that we call a community chest where anybody, any groups, that want to use the woods, rather than thinking about they can't use it because of cost, they contribute what they can contribute and then we use that to do different projects in the woods.
One of them was to invite some artists to the woods to come, and for them to look at some of the stuff we'd found all around the space that seemed out of place but had become a part of the identity of the woods. So we invited some artists down and they spent maybe six months working on different installations around the woods.
It was wonderful because we had young people and families coming on while this was happening. So not only were they getting to use the trees, then they would wake up in the morning and say, "I've just seen a deer! And there's a rabbit and there's a pheasant! What's that? That's a bird. No, it's a pheasant. That's a pigeon."
These artworks started to appear from nowhere. Their imagination began to flourish. All these children who had adopted really hard personas and identities in order for them to survive in their own space realized that to survive out here you've got to just chill out and just enjoy the space. You could see the difference in the faces when people use the space.
We thought we'd get some volunteers involved, because it's a big wood and there's a lot of work to do. So we started to target ex-offenders and drug users. We brought a few of them up here and they stayed a good number of days and weeks cutting, burning, clearing. Because if we don't get in touch with our ecology and we focus on what's happening in the world, then we are going to lose some of the most beautiful experiences, landscapes, and young people to a system that has no understanding of how environments like this can be used to educate young people in a far, far more holistic way than just a national curriculum.
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1 Comment so far
Tom
October 13, 2009
Excellent work, keep it up.