I casually agreed to join some friends at a free workshop for children and adults of all ages, working with boxes. And turned up at Printworks London, immediately blown away by the scale and magnificence, both of the venue and the project underway - pretty pleased to have trekked to Surrey Quays with two small children!Funded in part by a local regeneration project, artist Charlie Evaristo-Boyce had used dozens of boxes to create a city, using a mixture of screenprint and spray paint. The magic of repetition and cityscraper patterns achieved through screenprint on white boxes was lovely.
But part of the project requirement was to invite the community in to contribute to the project, and so here we were, our part of the community comprising three grown ups, two small children and a baby.
Left fairly to our own devices, we decided to draw around the children and let them paint themselves onto a tower, while the other grown ups had a dabble with screen printing. It worked rather well and the children were amazing - this was perhaps Feets' first time painting on a large scale and the attraction of painting herself helped maintain her interest.
For me the key magic of the day was the size of the space and the sheer number of boxes and towers. What a joy it would be to work on such a 'blank canvas'!The other magic, perhaps not the magic the artists had in mind, was the joy for the children of exploring this box city - of building houses and tunnels out of unused boxes, playing hide and seek - simply being able to work with such a monumental medium was a dream for a groups of pre-schoolers.
Photos thanks to Eleanor Salter-Thorn
