During half term of May 2018 and throughout August 2018, we delivered family workshops at Canning Town Community Neighbourhood hub.
A 12 minute walk from the Clarion housing development and Canning Town library, Rosetta Arts has been rooted in this community for 25 years. We were commissioned by Newham Council in February 2017 to develop and install a major public artwork, and selected artist Helena Roden as her proposal took full consideration to incorporate the local environment of Canning Town.
Since then, we have delivered the project with Helena as well as a series of creative community workshops in Canning Town, involving local schools and consulting local residents about this new artwork. 93% of the people we reached out to were not aware of the ecology park in their neighbourhood, or of the Leaway river walk that is accessible from that point, and the ways in which it connects so many local communities, spaces and places.
To overcome this lack of local knowledge, we engaged with local families by offering art activities in one of the areas of lowest engagement with the arts in the country (data from national indicator surveys), and to help families come together during the school holidays, within their local area.
We ran 10 workshops at Canning Town library and approached Clarion residents on the Fife Rd development to attend using creative activities to engage them with the local area and people.
The workshops took inspiration from the local ecology park, a theme at the heart of the artwork created by Helena Roden for our commission of the Wharfside Art Tunnel, based in the heart of Canning Town. Led by artists Trisha McCauley, Veronica Rowlands and Olatumi Kassam, the sessions utilised a range of rich and diverse visual art media and processes to explore themes of nature within urban landscapes.
During the workshop series led by Veronica Rowlands, families created abstract compositions inspired from wildlife in Bow Ecology Park and architecture around Canning Town which they developed into stencils to each create a screen-printed tote-bag.
