Never Such Innocence visit Ark Greenwich Free School to host a collaborative poetry and art workshop!

On Wednesday 18th December 2019, Never Such Innocence (NSI) visited Ark Greenwich Free School alongside artist Josh Wright and Slam the Poet to host NSI’s first ever collaborative art and poetry workshop! 

The day was one to remember, as pupils created a wonderful installation reflecting on the evacuation of young people during the Second World War. 

To start the day, Josh and Slam the Poet introduced themselves and their nature of work. Following introductions, Josh briefly introduced the topic of evacuation during the Second World War and encouraged pupils to think about how it might have felt to have been an evacuee. 

Josh then invited the students to sit in pairs and discuss how they would like their art installation to look. After a quick show and tell, students decided they would like to create a large suitcase created out of ‘evacuee tags’. As a visual representation of the chaos of migration, the students suggested randomly hanging string from the suitcase throughout the room. The pieces of string would also have ‘evacuee tags’ hanging off them, with fragmented lines or phrases from students poems written onto the tags as a metaphor of displacement. 

After planning how the installation would look, pupils then entered a poetry workshop with Slam the Poet. Once the pupils had completed their work, the students chose lines from their poems to be written onto the evacuee tags before they headed off to lunch.

Refreshed after lunch, pupils worked together to cut paper, glue tags and help bring the installation to life!