presentation to kingswells p3s

Well, today is the day I presented my "sculpture" talk to the primary threes (all 58 of them!) in Kingswells primary school...what a great bunch they are, so polite and well behaved, it was a joy.

I started off with a wee powerpoint presentation, saying who I am, what I have done and now "do", and then into 50minutes of showing them my works, from Skene Sculptures to videos, games to flash animations.

I started with the sculptures at skene, letting them know how I built them, where they are, what materials I'd used, how I'd evaluated the area to decide where I thought was the best place for them to be built etc. One interesting point about "nest" that was raised was about its size, in one photo (without me in it) the kids thought it was small, when I revealed a photo of me inside the nest (9ft diameter), they were amazed. We had a short talk about scale, context (I'd explained what context meant, in this sense) and how we imagine things in our head, and they can then change when confronted with more information. We had many great discussions about stories you make up, when looking at these sculptures, when you come across them in the woods, what sort of questions do you ask yourself? imaginging you are small, big, a bird etc. I also talked about how photographs of sculptures are not as good as actually seeing the sculpture for real, as you get to walk round the space, assessing it from all angles...you can't do that in a photo.

I'd then started to show them some videos, everyone loved the animation of the wee man getting his arm pulled off, questions were asked about how I did it etc, one bright kid (obviously watches his DVD extras!) knew how to animate, he'd even produced one of his own videos at home on the PC...these kids are 7-8. Fantastic.

I'd talked about all my works, about "creativity" and how imagination leads to wonderful, new ways of looking at things, about how creativity can "realise" the imagination, all the methods of "outputting your creativity", paint, drawing, writing, acting etc. (something for everyone). Just a fantastic day, (hopefully) inspiring kids to go think about things a little more, and think about being creative...who knows what they'll take from it. Next week, I have a class of 28 (the other 28 the week after) and we'll be doing some sculpture classes in the woods, weather permitting. If not...I must create an indoor sculpture class...need to write that now, just in case.

Listening to : [P.U.T] - surgical ep : postal service - give up : UI - lifelike