The Big Draw

As a part of The Big Draw campaign and collaboration with Arnolfini, we were asked to produce creative activities to accompany the current exhibitions: 'A Picture of Health' and 'Jo Spence: From Fairy Tales to Photography'. The Big Draw (https://thebigdraw.org/) is a charity dedicated to promoting drawing as a tool for wellbeing, creativity, thought exchange and cultural engagement.

The exhibitions widely focused on health, and our group looked at it form environment perspective. We were inspired by photos of Polly Penrose (https://www.instagram.com/pollypenrosephotography/), one of artists taking part in this exhibition, where she adapts her naked body to houses interiors.

It looks like her body is literally shaped by the objects she comes in contact with. It made me think about how our immediate home environment affects us. I've been a long time believer of a great impact of our surroundings on our mood and feelings. This relation is so much amplified now, during this pandemic, when we spend more time at home than ever.

I proposed activities that would make people think of places that make them feel happy. Once they have their place in mind they would think what shapes, textures, colours, smells, etc this place consists of. They would draw/paint/collage those elements into a picture of their room/house. As a next step they would think how they could incorporate those elements into their home environment. I thought that it could be helpful to provide people with some resources in form of cut out images, in case they felt stuck or just needed a starting point.

We had a meeting and more ideas emerged. This was our plan for exercises:

We had another meeting to design layout of our booklet:

Each of us chose certain tasks to contribute. I designed paper cut-outs:

Our booklet slowly started taking shape:

This is the final result:

It was really interesting to work in a group. Once given our choice of topics and deciding on environment group, I had my own idea for the task. However, collaborating with more people made my idea become a smaller part of the whole design. It was nice to let go of control of all the elements and see what will emerge as a sum of joined efforts. It obviously took less time

on my behalf and was satisfying to see when final result emerged.

I am so used to thinking things up from beginning to an end, which means I don't have to compromise on what I think is important, and I have to say I really like this way. This exercise made me think though that apart from my very own designs it would be nice to get involved in a group design.

I think that the most interesting collaborations for me personally would be with people from different fields of expertise, like for example lighting and music, if I wanted to present my wallpaper installation as a part of multi-sensual exhibition/festival.