Here at BS3 Community, we LOVE the South Bristol Arts Trail! It’s such an amazing community event and it is a privilege to be a key venue. This September, we decided to get the Nursery children involved and create an Intergenerational, Interactive Art Exhibition, themed on “Nurturing Our Chicks”.
Conversations about birds
We wanted our art to reflect conversations that we have with children in Nursery. We often talk about how birds take care of each other, how they like to be cosy in their nests, and how fun it would be to fly. The children love to spot birds in our outdoor areas and at forest school and are fascinated by different types of birds. They are all individual and unique but still belong to one another. This is how we see the children in our care – unique individuals who belong to a fabulous community.
To kickstart our project, we invited each child in our Nursery, as well as some of our service users in Monday Club and Tuesday Club, to create individual feathers.
We love getting gloopy at nursery and offered paint, glitter, collage and crayons to the children to decorate their feathers. Our Monday Club and Tuesday Club friends chose to use tissue paper and pens for their masterpieces. We love that each feather is unique to it’s artist.
Rainbow Wings!
The feathers were beautiful on their own, but something really special happened when we put them together. They became the most glorious pair of wings where everyone’s art complimented one another.
More birdy bits….
As well as our wonderful wings, our children also created more birdy art – cheeky chicks, Patricia the Peacock, Clementine the Chicken, a nest, a bird house and some hatched eggs. We also got our chicks to take their own pics, so that we could get a bird’s eye view of what they see when they are with us.
Exhibition Installations made by our chicks
Kiddy-cam snaps ‘A Birds Eye View’ taken by the children
Putting it all together
Once our little artists had created their wonderful pieces, it was our job to put them together into one exhibition. We created a film so that visitors could peek behind the scenes and see what inspired the art on display. Watch the video below:
What makes you feel free (as a bird)?
Our children inspire us to look at the world in different ways. They are interested and engaged in everything that surrounds them and they remind us to see joy and wonder in the world. Being with them lifts us up. We asked our Arts Trail visitors to reflect on the art and we’d like to ask you the same question that we asked them ….
