This project involved twenty-eight 13 year old students (KS3-YR8) from Newall Green High School, Wythenshawe, Manchester.

The project was based on the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) Scheme of Work – Art and Design Unit 8C/YR8 – Shared View. This unit requires the students to work in groups to make a collective 3D structure. This is to be based on study and analysis of works of art from different periods and cultures in which ideas, beliefs and values are communicated through art, craft and design.

The QCA Scheme of Work was linked to the Manchester City Council Agreed Syllabus of Religious Education -Belonging to a Hindu Community. Due to the importance of symbolism in the communication of Hindu culture the artists working on this project included a specialist in Hindu dance and mime.

Over the weeks prior to the project the students studied the epic Hindu poem Ramayana as part of the Religious Education classes. The aim of the project was to give greater creative impact to the student’s learning as they discussed the values, ethics and morality that informed the life and actions of the characters in the story and related these to their individual lives and those of their family and friends. The children assumed the roles of individuals from the poem during their RE classes and were helped to analyze and study their character and attitudes.

The title of the project and the focus of the work with the children was based on the idea put forward by Victor Hugo in his novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame that until the invention of printing ‘ architecture was the principle universal form of writing. This gigantic book in stone, begun by the East, continued by ancient Greece and Rome, in the Middle Ages wrote its last page.’ The project focused on Hindu temple architecture as an extreme example of ‘the building as a book’ that is there to be read by the worshippers through the sculptural images that cover the surfaces of the building both inside and outside. The forms of the temple buildings themselves are also symbolic of the mountains and caves that are inhabited by the spirits.

The artists and teachers worked together to divide the story into twenty-eight parts. The basic requirement of this subdivision being that each child could create a simple tableau illustration for one of the parts and these could be put together to tell the whole story.

The project began with an introduction to Hindu art and architecture illustrated with slides. This introduction concentrated on helping the students to understand the ‘conventions’ of gesture and pictorial layout that form the basis of Hindu painting and sculpture. It also stressed the sequential nature of pictorial friezes in painting and sculpture and how the same characters could appear in a number of parts of the freeze as the story developed. To illustrate this the analogy was made with the ‘frames’ of a cartoon film.

In the music/dance workshop that followed the students were introduced to the conventions of movement and gesture through which the characters in the poem would express their ideas and emotions. Then working as individuals and in small groups they created a series of tableaux that illustrated the twenty-eight parts of the story that had been selected earlier by the artists. Each tableau was photographed using the digital camera.

It was explained to the students that the outcome of the project was to be a sculptural wall panel telling the story of the Ramayana and each child would illustrate his or her part of the story in a cardboard relief sculpture. The whole wall panel would form the centerpiece of the exhibition of the project.

At the start of the next workshop each student was given a copy of the photograph of his or her tableau, a large shoe box and a piece of card on which was drawn the outline of the interior surface of the box. The students were asked to paint a color picture – a backdrop - of the context in which their part of the story took place – for example – in the palace of the king.

During the remaining workshops the students drew the individual figures from their tableau photograph to a scale to fit into the shoebox. These were drawn on card, painted, cut out and each student then glued the figures and backdrop into their box ready for placing in the finished sculptural wall panel.