The Weekend Academy is currently working
with students and staff from five Pupil Referral Units in North London, on
a visual arts project for young people who are outside mainstream education.
Artists Oreet Ashery, Janey Hagger and Stephen Wilson led a painting project in 2005, working with KS3 and KS4 students. The Weekend Academy invited selected pupils to return in 2006, to work with Oreet Ashery and Douglas Ebbage on an animation project, developing characters and making individual and group animations.
The Weekend Academy has been presenting this work to a wider audience this year 2007, with the production of two teachers’ workbooks for simple animation and large-scale portrait-painting courses, developed from the workshops for this project. These are currently being piloted by PRUs and schools, and will be published in 2008, together with an exhibition of students’ work and a conference. Sample pages can be viewed in pdf format from the links below.
This project has been generously funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, with the intention of developing skills and confidence among both students and staff at the units, and to encourage further self-initiated work by PRU units with artists and students outside mainstream provision.
