A lovely breezy summery seaside day and lots of families in for a play on DUNE and plenty in to see Copacabana – so a really mixed crowd. It was great to be able to link all the spaces – so that people who had been on the roof might have espied Sovereign Lighthouse and we’d talk about that, and it proved a great way to point them towards Catherine Yass’s photos of it – and then if people had wandered in from the film in the gallery 2 could then be directed to telescope on roof and to her photos of in gallery 1.

Had some interesting conversations with pupils from Bexhill High School about re-painting the DLWP in their preferred colours – one suggestion was to cover it in graffiti and paint the inside pink and purple. Another suggestion was the addition of a sensory room with dolphins, furry animals and music plus an array of trampolines.
Inspired by Yass’s use of positive and negative photography to create an atmospherically charged atmosphere we talked about how different colours influenced how we might in different coloured spaces. There was a collection of pictures of the DLWP to work with and the aim was to colour particular spaces in the building using colours that represented indivdual’s response to the selected space.

Pre-school aged participants particulalry enjoyed cutting up coloured paper and inventing their own spaces whilst older ones used the coloured crayons in fits and starts whilst disucssing a vast range of topics. The most noticable thing was the degree to which people just sat themselves down and coloured furiously – enjoying the rich and varied colours available.

Posted by Ryan Coleman on Sunday 3 July 2011