Creative Community Spaces #3
Creative Community Spaces #3
Collaborative art projects and building community spaces with young people.
In these ‘Creative Community Spaces’ articles I aim to share my journey in organizing creative workshops and fostering community groups. In sharing my own experiences — the triumphs, the challenges, and the setbacks — I hope to inspire others, in some small way, encouraging them to forge connections and establish spaces that nurture our communities for the future.
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CREATING A SPACE - Building and dreaming
Since I last wrote about our work towards creating a permanent home education community space, we have made huge progress. The space we are using, an old office and warehouse building owned by one of our friends, is now cleared and cleaned. In the last few weeks we have acquired furnishings (mostly up-cycled and free), set up many of the rooms ready for use and begun filling the space with games, books and art supplies. The work we have put into the building is giving it life, changing a dirty, unused space into a warm, inclusive and exciting place to be.
A few weeks ago we held our first get together in the newly named ‘Project Create’ and it was amazing. There is still lots of work to be done but it was exciting.
COLLABORATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS - Marble run
At our first few hang-outs at ‘Project Create’, I facilitated 3 collaborative creative projects to begin building connection and community between our young people. The first was an epic, large scale, marble run building project.
MATERIALS:
Long cardboard tubes - I sourced these for free from a local fabric supply store and then cut them into varying lengths, splitting some down the middle to form half pipes.
Stackable plastic crates - These are great for adding height to your structures
Large cardboard boxes
Smaller cardboard tubes
Cardboard
Pool noodles
Fixing materials like cable ties and Kraft packing tape
Scissors and craft knives
Marbles
It was fantastic seeing the young people collaborate, solve problems and work on building the huge construction together.
MINI COMMUNITY SPACES - Art house cubby
The second project we embarked on was building a cardboard cubby house for the younger children to play in. I constructed the house using large sheets of cardboard. The children then created mini artwork ‘tiles’ to decorate.
I created the first iteration of the project 4 years ago when writing my children’s craft book, Adventures in Cardboard. Since then I have made many versions for creative workshops. This house, collaboratively decorated with each of the children’s artworks, will stay at our home education co-op space for everyone to play in. A mini community building within our community space.
COLLABORATIVE MURAL
The third project we have been working on together over the last few weeks is a collaborative artwork to decorate the walls. Each child and adult involved in our community space drew around their hands onto a large board. The then painted the overlapping hands together with each person adding their creative mark.
This artwork fills me with so much joy and excitement for the future of our community space.
Thank you for taking the time to read about some of the simple ways I’m using creativity to bring people together. I hope it inspires you in some small way.
Eleanor X