Shrinking Childhoods

 

Tate Modern: Exhibition

18 November 2004 – 9 March 2005

 

During the Summer, over 1,000 children aged between four and twenty attended a series of workshops organised by children’s charity Kids Company in collaboration with Tate Modern. For the Shrinking Childhoods exhibition, the work they produced is displayed in a series of Portocabins situated on the South Lawn outside Tate Modern.

In these works, the children aim to communicate their experiences of life in tough inner-city neighbourhoods through replicating their own everyday environments. The exhibition offers a thought-provoking insight into the valient struggles that these young people have been through, in order to cope with daily lives which are dominated by violence and poverty.

 

I worked with primary school children to produce these "brains" related to their deepest fears.
A table of brains lie on a table showing what a lifetime of abuse has left in the children's heads: a black scorpion, severed wires labelled 'love' and a carefully drawn picture of a smiling little girl in a red skirt carrying flowers, that has been screwed into a tiny ball and shoved into the furthest recesses of the brain.( Resin, plastic, lightbox)

 

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/nov/21/art.drugsandalcohol

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/shrinking-childhoods