Swimmer out of water
General | Georgina Lock | 14.04.08
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Paris. Milan. Bilborough.
by Ian Oxlade
Our Editor meets the Nottingham seven and eight year olds who worked with Vivienne Westwood on her 2008 Paris Fashion Show.
Portland Primary School sprawls like happy barracks. I have come to Bilborough to interview thirty-three of its Year Three pupils who have had their work, crafted by Vivienne Westwood, slink down the catwalk of Paris Fashion Week. I am led to an empty classroom, empty because I’ll be thanking the pupils for their hard work by playing some theatre games with them and we need the space. There are five displays decorating the walls. One on that infant’s perennial, Ancient Egypt, one on Damien Hirst, one on Peter Blake, one on Antony Gormley and one on Westwood herself.
I cannot stand it when I see children patronised. For years and years, World War Two to me was dashing spitfire pilots handing stockings to their Sussex lovers. Easy and dangerous. Much harder and braver to explain genocide to a child. Don’t get me wrong. I will not be sitting my children in front of Alain Resnais’ documentary ‘Night and Fog’ until they’re ready. It’s sensible to protect them, at least for a while, from piles of emaciated corpses and women’s hair. They are children after all. But please, it was a war. There was more to it than moustaches and romance. Children have a superior ability to spot fibs and false integrity and when they see it, they stop listening.
Let’s give them the Art, and young. Let’s demystify Artists. Hirst, Gormley, Blake, Westwood and the others. The notion of the tortured genius, hacking his soul to pieces in a Paris garret that might as well be Mount Olympus, is misleading and exclusionary. Equally, a great piece of work does not just appear, zapped into existence by a superman like Picasso or Beethoven. Art should be seen for what it is, something that you can get better at, a craft. And if the Art is truly great and seems as distant from our own abilities as Jupiter, start building a spaceship.
It’s going to take ages to build a spaceship so start as early as possible. So bravo to Maddy Bell who started her class of seven and eight year olds working on a project about Vivienne Westwood, using the fantastical paintings of Henri Rousseau as a starting point. Maddy’s class last year made designs and wrote to Westwood who made a donation to the school. Maddy’s current class reaped the benefits, receiving blank tops to decorate, Elizabeth II’s face adorning one in punky homage. But the best is yet to come.
Surely success is measured by the future opportunities your work wins you. Process beats product. Hands down.
Designing fifty garments and the models’ make-up, the children also hand-painted materials used for Westwood’s Paris show, many of the children most proud of their Rousseau-like jungle on giant green silk. Maddy Bell, another teacher called Miss Taylor and, most importantly, Euan Bonser and Phoebe Ackroyd, both seven and picked from a hat, saw stilted models emerge from a jungle backdrop to march their designs down one of Paris’ catwalks. The work was well received by Vogue. The four fashionistas went up the Eiffel Tower, Euan and Phoebe unafraid, and came home. Triumph. That’s the way to do it, Punch might say.
They also saw the ‘Mona Lisa’. Just a famous painting by a clever man. These Nottingham children know they can produce at the highest level because they have already done it.
The class were commissioned to write their own articles from this starting point: Once upon a time there were two children from Bilborough who went to a magical land called Paris Fashion Week. I selected three from a fine harvest.
General | Ian Oxlade | 03.04.08 Comments (0)
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