Sketchbook pages from collaborative workshops with young people from Tuke School with South London Gallery, 2025
Rain break
A poetic nod to the continued cycle of this project from the previous ‘Cloud work’ hosted by South London Gallery, Rain Break invited young people from Tuke School to consider rainwater as a resource to creatively collaborate with. Moving with the weather, we orchestrated a flow of our findings both indoors in the gallery studio and outdoors in the garden. Water was transformed through paper pulped surfaces and broken umbrellas, explored through colour and sound.
Painting with the rain
Paper ripping and sorting
Paper pulping
Dry paper pulp panels before they were added to the umbrella skeleton
The sculpture evolved over the course of the workshops, behaving almost like a sketchbook, with photographs from the earlier sessions being pulped and arranged back into the paper pulped panels.
Unexpected sketchbook collaborations, a piece of drawing adding onto the spine of the book by string, Theo’s wall work below is his independent making beyond the collective umbrella making but I also see it as expanded sketchbooking.
Many streams of paper naturally returned to the sketchbook, the image iterations have been a fluid process to echo during these exchanges with the young people at the gallery.
Our umbrella sculpture before many more additions of the rain paintings created by the group, which can be seen below.
Jayden finding out that the umbrella has a few holes in it...
Using the umbrella sculpture to shade us from the sun, after the rain break.
We later returned one of our paper pulp sculptures back to pulp, recording the vibrational sounds of this happening with a hydrocontact microphone.