Last Wednesday April 4 I met the ‘Gimme Shelter’ group for a follow-on workshop to their last 11 months of involvement in the Necklace Park. Most recently you will all have seen these girls’ video on the Mapping the Necklace website, and read about their subsequent work with well-known architect Ian McChesney www.mcchesney.co.uk in February, with whom they explored the role of existing site, materials, usage and possibilities as part of the design process.

So…last week, with everybody gathered around a table, I introduced the idea of scaled model-making, and left the girls to choose appropriate model-making material and equipment which were laid out in their middle. The following 90min was filled with total concentration and silence, very busy and capable hands. For the last hour we went out for a walk along the river equipped with Polaroid cameras, and the girls were asked to take photographs, looking out for sites and materials corresponding with their ideas and the models they've made.

The idea is to look at the photographs and the models together in our next workshop this coming Wednesday April 11 and consider how site-responsive the shelters are, and thus how appropriate the models/designs are accordingly. For the shelter mapping strand we'll experiment with the parallels of the physical journey and the narrative journey…taking, for example, a book or film known to each of the girls. This should result in a physical journey animated by narrative and narrative scenes, accommodated by physical shelters in the Necklace Park.

It’s a pleasure to work with this team!