Pass the Pencil | Art in the Community
As part of my ongoing exploration of Art in the Community, below is a summary of some selected collaborative art projects.
A Portrait of Marlborough Town
This is a project in the ideas stage where I would like to work with children and young people in my own town to create a huge series of drawings that depict a sense of youth identity in Marlborough. The ideas is being proposed to the Marlborough Town Council with the hope that the project brings together kids and young people from a wide range of backgrounds to create an artwork that expresses who they are and may be exhibited, encouraging discussion and engagement through the visual language of drawing.
Preshute Primary School Playground Mural - 2021-2
In 2021 I worked with groups of children from Preshute Primary School in Manton to create a wall mural to brighten up the school playground. As a starting point, we drew round 7 children, one from each of the 7 school years from Reception to Year 6 to symbolise inclusion. We included the birds, which made reference to freedom. The kids wanted to paint themselves in the brightest colours and one boy was a recent arrival from Ukraine so the other kids painted him in blue and yellow as a reference to the war in his home country. He had not learnt much English but he understood entirely the generosity of this small gesture. The final mural is now a part of the school landscape and a reminder of how each child involved contributed to making their environment more colourful and joyful.
January Drawing Club | Founder - 2022 to date
A free online drawing community offering support and encouragement around an expanded view of drawing. I began JDC in 2022 as I felt I wasn’t drawing as much as I wanted to and so I offered a drawing prompt every day in January 2022 to get myself started. An amazing 1,000 drawings were shared on Instagram so I decided to keep the initiative running. It is now an established resource for monthly Zoom drawing sessions and occasional tutorials that are aimed at an affordable means of learning formal aesthetics and an opportunity to connect with artists around the world. The philosophy is based in the idea that drawing is part of our DNA, many of us just ‘unlearn’ to draw in our formative years and JDC provides the opportunity to connect with our own mark making and visual language in any small way. Click here for more information.
Online Artist Collaborations | Founder of Pass the Pencil - 2020 to date
This is an ongoing endeavour to create opportunities online for artists both hobby and professional to work together to draw and make collectively. Projects include:
A Letter in Mind | National Brain Appeal Artist Submission Workshop November 2025 - a free opportunity to create a small artwork on the back of an envelope to submit to the Letter in Mind Appeal to help fund neuroscientific research into brain diseases
Postal Painting Project 2020 - organisation of small groups of artists to engage in a postal ‘exquisite corpse’ project where each artist responds to a work in progress by another artist and posts it on until the artwork is completed.
The Big Draw Contributor 2020 to date - participation and wider organisation of events as part of the charity which is around visual literacy that strives to raise the profile of drawing as a tool for wellbeing, thought, creativity, and social and cultural engagement.
Grundschule Mitte, Nördlingen - 2019
In 2019 I undertook a collaborative project with children from the local primary school where we lived in Bavaria. One year group of children visited my studio where we brainstormed ideas around identity and how they would like to be visually represented. We created two large drawings of 2x1.5 metres. I asked the kids what was important to them as Year 3 students at Grundschule Mitte and they said they identified most with playing recorder (their teacher was an excellent flautist) and sport with several kids playing for the local football team. They felt they loved both summers and winters in their town and wanted one to be summery and one to be snowy. The top left image below is the images still hanging in the entrance of the primary school in 2025. Every child in Year 3 participated with children who had previously had little access to the arts gaining the most from the experience. Working on one larger project encourages collaboration, joint ownership and compromise amongst the children. The children fed back at the end of the year that this project had been the highlight of that academic year.
Migration Crisis Art Initiative, Berlin 2015-17
This project was initiated by a small, informal group of local artists responding to the Migration Crisis in 2015 where large groups of recent migrants were struggling to make sense of their new environment and due to cultural differences were less able to engage with the community at large. The project was conceived for a Migration Centre in Prenzlauer Berg in East Berlin.
The aim was to work with the women and girls who tended not to leave the Centre and avoided hobbies and activities in favour of staying in their rooms, cooking and keeping company with other women. It was hard to draw the women out but some of the girls, particularly the teenagers were curious and we made several paintings on paper around identity and where the girls saw their futures in their new country. The language barrier meant we couldn’t always fully grasp what it was that the images portrayed but the garden was very important and the snowy one suggested integration into the cold, snowy Berlin they had suddenly found themselves in, completely new and foreign to many of the residents. Many of the teenagers expressed positivity around clothing choices, wearing hoodies and styling their hair in a more German/European fashion. Many of the women were very reserved and did not seem as quick to engage with the project, other than one woman who made a huge painting of her dream to one day work as a dental nurse. The paintings were exhibited in the Centre to encourage a wider discussion around the crisis and expression of resident identities.
Due to safeguarding and cultural preferences, photography was strictly limited.
