This project involved twenty-seven 8/9 year old children (KS2 – YRS3+4) from Benchill Primary School, Wythenshawe, Manchester.

Early on in discussions with the teachers they expressed the view that in their opinion the children involved would benefit more from a project based on the place of the individual in the community and how this would inform the children’s understanding of citizenship.

The aim of the project was to assist the children in establishing and refining their self- awareness and defining this in relationship to the other children, teachers and family members.

The teachers and artists evolved a project that utilized the children’s experience of crowds of people or in the case of more solitary children introduced them to the idea of people coming together for whatever reason. The experience was intended to increase the children’s understanding of the complexity and cultural diversity of the population in which they live and their relationship as individuals to their community.

The intention was to make the children more aware of how and why groups of people form in the built environment of towns and cities and the implications of such congregations of people for the individual citizen. Through a multi-sensory approach the children were introduced to their own ‘body space’ which was presented as ‘the zone’ in which they felt at ease in relation to other people and the buildings around them. This was done through a dance and movement workshop in which the children explored the theme of ‘people in places’. After the workshop the children talked about and drew images of their feelings during the workshop and how it had felt to be an individual in a crowd of people.

In the next workshop a ‘life size’ overhead projector image of people shopping in a crowded city street was projected onto a large sheet of paper fixed to the wall. The children were encouraged to talk about their experience of shopping in a similar crowded place The children were asked ‘to adopt’ people in the image – to put themselves in their place - talk to the class about who they thought they were, what were their lives like and what were they feeling.

Over the next four workshops the class was split into two groups with each group working on a task for two weeks and then swapping over. The first task was to paint a life size mural over the OHP image of the crowded street that was projected on the paper.

The second task was for the children to look at themselves in a full-length mirror and then paint a full-length self-portrait. This they did by first lying on large individual sheets of paper in a position they remembered from the movement workshop. They were asked to select a pose that they felt expressed some aspect of their personality. The artist and teachers then drew around them and the children used this outline as the starting point to fill in the self-portrait. They were told they could portray themselves wearing clothes they had dreamed of wearing or they could disguise themselves in fancy dress Having made that decision the children were encouraged to represent the clothes they imagined they were wearing out of re-cycled fabric and to glue these on to the paper in the form of a collage. The features of face, hands and feet were to be drawn and painted.

The artists had told the children that their idea for the exhibition was to re-create the crowd that the children had acted out in the dance workshop. To create the exhibition the portraits were cut out and mounted on corrugated card and hung in the exhibition space with the murals as a backdrop. When the children visited the Gallery they could be photographed standing in ‘the crowd’ alongside their life size portrait.