Sketchbook pages from collaborative workshops with young people from Tuke School with South London Gallery, 2025
Rain break
A four month-long project I designed and delivered with South London Gallery titled Rain Break (a poetic nod to the renewed cycleof workshops previously named ‘Cloud work’) invited SEND young people from Tuke School to consider rainwater as a immersive resource to collaborate with as a live material. Moving in tandem with the winter weather, we orchestrated flows of making both indoors in the gallery studio and outdoors in the garden. Water fused paper pulped surfaces and transformed broken umbrellas into temporary shields from the sun, waterproof microphones turned raindrops into beats to move to, vibrations to feel on toes and hands without turning wet. We tried to capture rain into colours, puddles, ponds and pictures. These poetic gestures were shared with many more of the disabled students at Tuke School in a final sharing event, umbrellas harboured paper rain and turned the schools hall into a flurry of performative rain embodied by sound, kinetic sculpture and gifted umbrellas which visually distributed these unique workshop happenings.
Painting with the rain
Paper ripping and sorting turned offcuts and waste into paper confetti.
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.