WYPW X Kirklees Children’s Biennale project!

Artist Sam Groom get’s prepping for WYPW X Kirklees Children’s Biennale project!

As an organisation, one of the things we have missed most during the last 12 months is the work we do with the younger members of our community. Having successfully secured funding to deliver a project as part of the Kirklees Children’s Biennale way back in 2019, this particular project has been a long time coming! 

The Children’s Biennale is a festival of arts and culture made with children and young people across the Kirklees region. WYPW have been commissioned to work with artist printmakers to deliver a series of workshops in schools and colleges, culminating in an exhibition of the work at our Unit 2 space in Huddersfield as part of the Finale celebrations in June 2021.

One of the artists working on the project is printmaker Samantha Groom (whose lovely work you may be familiar with from our gallery shop! 🙂 ). A keen block printer, Sam has been busy developing ideas for her workshops with Huddersfield New College students who will be working on imagery inspired by their local areas and their experiences during the pandemic. The designs they create will be printed as long, repeating paper lengths in a project named Urban Wallpaper – a reference to their experiences and domestic existence over the past year.

In preparing for the sessions, collaboration, conversation and various printing techniques to inspire the students and develop their creative skills has been key to Sam’s planning. We caught up with her to arrange the final points of the workshops and it felt great to be back to sorting real life, in the flesh events again! “I’m really looking forward to visiting Huddersfield College and working with the Y12 students for the Urban Wallpaper Project. It would be fantastic if the outcome is several distinctly different lengths of wallpaper. Colours, arrangement of the imagery, themes, etc, it will hopefully be very diverse and representative of the students and their interests and style – I can’t wait to get started!”

We are so excited to get back to physical workshops once more, see what the students get up to and of course the final work – stay tuned for more updates and a sneak peek before the final exhibition!