By Hand Summer
This week of Brightworks Summer Camp included play writing, drawings, clay-working, paper maiche, storytelling, and instrument-making. The kids led collaborators Christie and Lili on the adventure of The Great Train Mystery, where detectives and lobsters visited cheese shops and chased Al Capone and his team of robbers, against a hand-drawn backdrop during days of incredible, imaginative improvisation and stories.
Check out more pictures on our Flickr page.
By Hand Camp, Day 5
A whirlwind day followed by a whirlwind week!
Check out the last day of photos from By Hand Camp here.
Highlights include a giant harmonograph, a spirograph of sorts and gravity painting on 14 foot pieces of butche paper hung from the ceiling.
By Hand Camp, Day 4
Mounted paintings, finished our suspended harmonograph, made collages, played with wire and had a ton of free play time. My kind of day.
The free play that happened at the park was beautiful. Games were invented that simply could not have been created by an adult. There was chanting, turn taking, shared burden and shared responsibility. They were the kind of games (and kind of cooperation) that can only happen when you only have as much power as the other people want to give you. It’s the nature of unregulated peer play to teach an entirely different set off skills.
By Hand Camp, Day 3
What a day! With the fourth of July we only had 5 kids show up to camp today. In the morning we hot-glued nails face up to paper and wood. Then we dropped paint-filled balloons from our 20-foot kid-made tower. It was possibly the most dangerous art I have ever been a part of. In the afternoon we did coke and mentos experiments till we where soaked and tired.
We had 12 bottles of coke, enough for everyone to try twice. The result was amazing. The first try most people played it safe, but with the second bottle people got really creative. There was the “shower head” modification and the double-bottle fuzz catcher. Trial and error, the most powerful teacher.
By Hand Camp, Day 2
Today we worked on three major projects: our own personal accordion notebooks and suminagashi prints, and continued work on our drawing machine.
We climbed high to put paracord over our rafters.
We did so very attentively.
The kids took the camera.
They got some really great shots.
The afternoon was all suminagashi and pendulum building.
More on the pendulum tomorrow.
By Hand Camp, Day 1
We are off again. This week it’s Justine and me on staff, with intern and volunteer support from Anna and Kellie.
We focused today on painting. Specifically chaotic and random painting. We splattered and splotched our way to some amazing works. After a nice long park time we came back and started working on our pendulum drawing machine.
After working small, we started on a bigger canvas. 10ft by 9ft.
Starting tomorrow’s project today, we began collecting parts for our pendulum.
More photos over on our flickr!
