Children’s Art

Over two years of workshops, fieldtrips and individual sessions, the Children’s Poly-Olbion project used the arts ~ storytelling, music, poetry, painting, sketching, film, theatre, sculpture ~ to enable children and young people to access Drayton’s literary works, bringing ideas that initially seem distant and irrelevant to the young person’s life and experience vibrantly into their world and creative vocabulary.

The work produced during those two years has been extraordinary and deeply moving: topographical self-portraits juxtaposing wide, unflinching  images of self with beloved places, maps delineating the criss-cross pathways of their daily loves in the far west of England, plays resurrecting lost historical moments in Salisbury plain, a pictorial litany of saints, their lives and attributes turned into graphic, comic book hyper-reality. Quite literally a new collaborative  record of Britain as experienced by marginalised young people, the Children’s Poly-Olbion sings new life into its mirror text: adding fresh vital layers to a poem that itself rests on a deep strata of other text, other narratives.