The Fine Art of Surfacing

Anne-Louise Quinton

These are some ideas and starting points for projects Anne-Louise Quinton shared in a CPD session titled ‘The Fine Art of Surfacing’. The focus of the session was how teachers and pupils can access inspiration just outside of your front door/school entrance.

DOOR TO DOOR:

7 tasks your students could do with a focus on doors

Invite your students to research doors through history. This will give them an understanding of size, materials, decorations and purpose. This in itself is fascinating but also allows students to discover a timeline and see how styles are revived.
Ask your students to go for a walk and take photographs of doors. This could be on their usual route to school, around town, or further afield. This will give them a sense of what’s similar and different – shape, panelling, windows, handles, letterboxes, keyholes, colours, materials, condition etc. Then invite them to play with groupings – group them by what ranking, age, colour. Or compare and contrast their findings with the beauty of doors in other countries (Italy, Spain, Greece) or from different movements (Art Nouveau, Brutalism, Romanticism).
Give your students an ‘emotional mood board’. Not unlike a textiles/fashion mood board – one board with different categories like happy, sad, lonely, strong, angry, fearful, scared, etc. Send them out to find doors that capture these words. Condition, location, lighting, colour and many other features can play a part in how they categorise them. Get them to think about what it is about the doors that made them assign them to different categories.
Refer to Gary Hume’s paintings of doors for inspiration – how might they also use the simplistic shapes and colours in their work? With Hume’s approach in mind, task them with recording the shapes and styles they see in doors around your school.
Invite your students to use a range of materials to create visual responses to this catalogue of doors – technical drawings, paper collage, carving from clay, stitching and montage. Think of the whole street of doors that could then be displayed in your classroom or down a corridor at the end.
Look at the University of Cambridge’s Thresholds project – a great example of how visual art and writing can come together. Could you create a similar cross-curricular project with your English department? Invite students to write a poem or imagined story to accompany the doors they’ve made. If any students find writing daunting, they could just put single word descriptions or word clouds next to their doors.
While you’re thinking about collaborating with English, could you invite your students to research fantastical doors? Are there any doors they’ve read about or seen in fantasy books or films? Invite them to photograph an environment familiar to them (e.g. their street, the road your school is on) and then embed a depiction of their fantasy door in it.

WINDOWS ON THE WORLD:

5 tasks your students could do with a focus on windows

Similar to the prompts about doors, invite your students to research different types of windows through history, or make their own collection of photographs of windows they have taken in their local area (e.g. around school, in their neighbourhood). Again, think about what’s similar and what’s different between them, and how styles have changed over time.
Ask your students to turn one of their photographs into a 3D image – maybe a narrow depth scene like Peter Blake’s ‘Girl in a Window’. You could construct the window and frame from cardboard, plastics or tissue paper. How might everyone’s windows look together? Could you create a whole house or street scene from them? Where might this be displayed in school for maximum impact? Could these windows be illuminated and then set up somewhere dark for a really theatrical display?
A simpler approach could be to ask the students to recreate their photographs of interiors as 2D artworks and then place them behind a real window frame. How does overlaying the frame change the image?
Look at Astrid Jaekel’s ‘Windows of Wigtown’. Invite your students to pick a specific window they would like to fill in the same way – this could be in school, at home, or in the community. Ask them to respond in a similar way to Jaekel and include personal responses – maybe text and images that also say something about them, their local community, or where they live. Could these windows be backlit for maximum impact?
Use Banksy’s work ‘Forgive us our trespassing’ (2011) as inspiration – he created this stained-glass painting by placing the panels of the window in a school playground and inviting students to add tags, designs, images and messages that were personal to them. You could do the same – either inviting your students to all adds their own graffiti in a similar way, or inviting them to each add a photo to a bigger collage of images.

YOU’RE GROUNDED:

8 tasks your students could do focusing on the ground beneath them

Ask your students to ‘collect’ as wide a range of street flooring as possible – by photographing it, sketching it, taking etchings from it. You could discuss variations in colour, different types of stones and concrete blocks, pavements versus tarmac, kerbs etc.
Could you be really ambitious and impress clay on sections of ground around your school and then make plaster of paris casts?
Look at the work of The Boyle Family and invite your students to crop, frame and group their collections in order to create a fully composed series of results in a similar fashion.
Using their collections of street flooring, ask your students to choose an image to recreate using other materials. How might they capture or enhance these textures using ripped papers, papier mache, mixed media, casting from moulds etc? Or perhaps through textiles where fabrics are layered, stuffed and joined? Transform a cold hard surface into a soft and warm result.
Look at the work of French street artist EMEMEM as inspiration – are there spaces where students could improve and embellish the gaps and flaws in the ground around them? Could this be something they literally do on school grounds? Or could they take photographs and then photoshop their embellishments?
Think about fossils – are there any impressions in the surfaces of the streets around your area? Ask your students to come up with ‘fossils for the future’ – what items from today do they think could be fossilised in the ground and discovered in years to come? Make moulds and use postcrete to set objects of our times in. Could these be displayed somewhere in your school to look like they’ve just been uncovered?
Look at Cornelia Parker’s pavement crack casts – how could students capture negative space? Could they sketch the shapes of the cracks they can see or even make casts of them? Could they then take inspiration from the Japanese art of Kintsugi and fill these gaps with gold?
A seemingly infinite number of random items are lost or discarded into our streets. Could you students go around recording or even collecting them, and imagine the stories behind them? Could the students create sculptures from or inspired by their found items? Could they crop images of them into abstraction?

SIGNS OF THE TIMES:

7 tasks your students could do that explore typography and signage

Learning to create typography can be complicated – point sizes, typefaces and proportion can be hard. Starting with numbers can make things simpler as there are only ten to master. Set your students the challenge of ‘gathering’ numbers from their local environment by photographing them – Which numbers are most frequent? How can they be represented in different styles? Then ask your students to think about displaying them – do they want to put them up in a line? Do they want to group them by number?
Get your students to think about how they could make 3D versions of the numbers they’ve photographed – clay, casting, moulds, carvings, fabric. Could they go further and think about the shapes and forms they find in their numbers, and make an abstracted print of say the curve of a ‘6’ or the angles of a ‘4’?
Could this be an opportunity to collaborate with Maths teachers? Would any of them like numerical artworks to have in their classroom or corridor? Could Maths teachers or classes also start to gather their own numbers to add to those your students are collecting?
Ask your students to go around their local area (school, their neighbourhood, their high street) and ‘collect’ signs. They could sketch them or photograph them. Could they then make a 3D version of one of their signs out of cardboard and paper? Bring everyone’s signs together to create an imagined high street.
Humour and puns play a big part in our street language and shop signs. Could students use collage from their collection of signs to create their own witty shop signs? Could everyone’s pun-ny signs be brought together to create the funniest high street imaginable?
Look at the work of Jake Tilson and see how he takes interesting shapes, colours and texts from shops and reinvents a street sign as artwork. Could your students also collect or capture text/signage from similar vendors (e.g. grocers, clothes shops, fast food cafes) and create dynamic re-invented shop signage.
Stickers, flyers and posters are everywhere. They can be the easiest or most difficult things to remove. Some of the best visuals are half peeled and lost sheets, layered over each other. Some change their meaning when half a word is lost and another revealed. Using a combination of photography, montage and graphics, ask your students to explore the mixed and reimagined messages in interesting visual ways.

OUR HOUSE:

3 tasks your students could do that invite them to look at buildings as a whole

Provide your students with building blocks/jenga blocks and ask them to create a structure that balances – try out different shapes and styles. When they have a structure they like, get them to photograph it, and superimpose their new ‘building’ into a landscape – could it be on a packed high street or in the middle of a field?
Look at the work of Dave Rob or Steve Millership and think about how art has been used to advertise buildings and places as destinations. Could your students create posters in a similar style to ‘sell’ a location in your local area or perhaps in your school? This could be done using photoshop, line drawing, collaging with card or gouache paint.
Take inspiration from the large-scale, site-specific installations of Christo and Jeanne-Claude – especially their buildings wrapped in fabric. Could your young people create ‘wrapped’ versions of buildings in your local area? Through photoshop, drawing, or literally wrapping a model of a building in fabric? Think about the locations, structural and historical importance, and purposes of the buildings Christo and Jeanne-Claude have chosen – how might these questions influence the buildings your students choose?