This isn't the kind of art that is about drawing bowls of fruit or writing a sonnet, it's about engaging young people in a different way.
Print on paper
Print with pens
Print with your fingers
Explore the beginnings, the middles,
right to your finger ends
Print with hands
Print with wheels
Print with bikes
You can even do a wheelie if you like
Find out what you can do with an artist's bike..
Visual artist Caroline Gaytor shares her skills and enthusiasm. Using found materials, the weird and the downright ordinary, she pulled out her bag of printing curiosities and got creative with the pupils from the Beckett Road Centre Pupil Referral Unit, young people who take part in darts' flagship Otherwise Creative project...
And on went the paint! Drip drip onto pram wheels, splattered onto a bin wheel, squeezed in between the tiny treads of a lego wheel, squidged out the sides of a trolley wheel, and then its print on paper, card, fabric, felt...
And along the way we talked about recycling, found out how we got to school, how we got to work, what time we got up in the morning, what we did last night, the kind of trail bikes we ride on Saturday afternoons, what we want for Christmas, what our dustbin looks like...
The arts have the power to access parts others cannot reach, to bring the cat to the curiosity, to open the windows of imagination and dust out the cobwebs, to help you talk the talk and find out what you're really wanting to talk about...
The Otherwise Creative project is for excluded young people, who are 'otherwise' educated so we help them get 'otherwise' creative! This isn't the kind of art that is about drawing bowls of fruit or writing a sonnet (although these are positive things too), it's about engaging young people in a different way - getting them on a bike, painting the wheels and doing some printing, seeing their wheelies and finding out what kind of bike they ride on Saturday afternoons and what they'd like to be doing next year, next summer on a July Saturday afternoon... Helping them dream, achieve.
The Otherwise Creative project engaged young people ages 14 to 16 years from a wide variety of excluded backgrounds including young parents, young people with mental health issues and emotional and behavioural difficulties and young people at risk of prostitution.
The work inspired the ground-breaking evaluation document 'Breaking the Cycle of Failure' featuring case studies, examples of good practice and the engagement matrix an evaluation tool to help measure 'success' and 'engagement' in arts settings.
This was followed by 'The Art of Engagement', a handbook of good practice for practitioners working with young people funded by the Gulbenkian Foundation. Both of these research documents are available from darts - see Publications.