This project involved sixty 8/9 year-old children (KS2/YRS3+4) from Oswald Road Primary School, Charlton, Manchester.

The project was based on the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority Schemes of Work – Art Unit 4A/Years3/4 – Viewpoints suggesting that children explore ways in which to convey the atmosphere and story of a dream. They should be introduced to the creative approach of artists who have taken up diverse and unconventional ‘viewpoints’ from which to communicate the visions of their imagination.

The project was also developed to promote aspects of citizenship in the curriculum. The project visit gave all the children a first hand experience of the built environment of the city centre of Manchester and how this had been affected by recent historic events. Such experience of the built environment for children is a fundamental part of all Education @ CUBE projects. For children to identify with the urban fabric and culture of their city has to be the starting point for what they understand it means to be a citizen. This project and others in the Education @ CUBE outreach programme emphasizes to children that citizenship is about being located and having a sense of belonging in a specific place.

Early on in the planning stage it was decided that the project should have at its core a scenario, which the children could relate to directly, and which gave rise to the title of the project ‘City of Dreams’. The scenario required the children to imagine they had been on a visit to Manchester and that night, on returning from the visit, they had fallen asleep and had a dream. The paintings and sculpture they were to produce during the project would tell the story of this dream and form an integral part of the exhibition of the project.

Based on ideas put forward by the children earlier the focal point of the exhibition was to be a giant model of the bedroom in which they had been sleeping when they had the dream. To launch the first workshop the artists constructed the model of the bedroom in the School Hall to show the children the scale of the work they were embarking on and how their individual contribution would relate to the whole.

The project began with the children visiting the city centre by public transport, which meant that from the time of setting out to the time of returning the children were immersed in the day-to-day life of the city. Their destination was the Royal Exchange Theatre from which they embarked on a walk around the Millennium Quarter which included visiting a number of ‘key’ buildings in that area. As this area of the city has recently been regenerated some of the buildings are traditional but others are of unusual design and detail.

The first workshop began with a discussion between the children, teachers and artists about the things they had seen on the visit and the context in which they had seen them. The children made a selection of the things that had impressed them and that they thought may appear in their dream. They then produced a painting of their walk around the city in which they were to include some of the items and incidents they had selected earlier. This painting was done on a large circle of card, which the children turned in a clockwise direction as they progressed with the painting. The decision to use this shape of card was made to encourage the children to reflect on the circular shape of the route they had walked and the sequential nature of the experience. These circular paintings were later displayed in the exhibition in such a way that the viewer could turn them and so recreate the sequence of the walk and the process of painting.

At the start of the second workshop the children selected a building from their earlier painting and embarked on building a model of this. The core of these brightly painted models was a large shoebox to which they could add other scrap objects or materials to represent the detail and decoration of the building or they could cut into the boxes to form doors and windows. Most children chose to produce individual models but a number chose to collaborate on larger and more complex buildings.

For the remaining workshops the children were divided up into groups to work on specific tasks. The tasks included working on the computer to scan in and color a drawing of their chosen building or working together on a piece of creative writing to describe the images of the dream.

As well as the three dimensional model of the dream sequence the exhibition was planned around a large painted mural. During discussions with the children it was decided that one of the most important parts of a dream were the bits you remembered when you woke up. They were often not very clear and “broken into bits” as one child described it. Based on this the children decide the mural should be divided up into lots of “bits” of irregular size and shape. Each week a different group of children filled in the shapes and sometimes a child would choose to work over an earlier image.