The Fear of Crime

I realised the other day that I have never posted anything here about my workshop facilitation and I have the perfect project to put that to rights! 

I recently worked with various teams at Croydon Council, the fabulous photography department at Croydon College and a stellar team of young people to conceptualise and shoot a project on the topic of 'The Fear of Crime'.

Young people often provoke an automatic negative response in others, and are often featured in the news as a faceless mass of bad eggs. 

The team and I wanted to show off the skills and creativity of young people by training them up as studio photographers. We also wanted to encourage others to see their individuality by asking the peers who posed for photos to tell us a little bit about themselves.

The resulting photos were totally stunning and really showed of the personalities of the diverse range of young people that got recruited to be sitters! Each one was shot and edited by the young photographers and I'm so proud of their achievements. 

A set of portraits with captions revealing a little snippet of info - but carefully not matched with any particular portrait so as to challenge the viewers' assumptions - is currently on show at the Click Clock Gallery in central Croydon. Please do stop by to see all their hard work if you are in the area. Here's a little sample to whet your appetite:

Below is a behind the scenes shot of the actual shoot day (thanks to my colleague Ally for this one) as well as a couple of quick videos from my Snapchat of the hanging (follow me there: @kleedale).

Order and Chance

I recently completed a five-week evening course at the Tate Modern. Each session, led by artist Sarah Sparkes, looked at a different aspect of the work of artist Alighiero Boetti, currently in exhibition at the gallery. We all made work inspired by the themes that intrigued him - grids, ordering, chance happenings, games, collages, repetition, mark-making and more. At the end of the course we held a small exhibition for friends and family at the top of the Tate building. Below are some images of the creators and their work.

 

A group-created artwork

 

The pieces below are mine.

 

The large piece on the easel is what I would call my final piece - double-exposed photographic prints cut up and rearranged according to certain rules. The final piece is unfortunately too big for my scanner but I've posted my preliminary tests below (you can see where they were displayed on the floor to left and right of the easel). 

(Sorry about the wonky scans)