Co-Designly Practice, (CDLY P) case study 4:

The Fourth Plinth Schools Award Competition:

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"The Fourth Plinth is one of the world’s most famous public art commissions. It plays an important role in bring-

 ing contemporary art and debate to millions for free and casting a new light on London’s most historic square".

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This year, (2020), we are a winner in The Fourth Plinth Schools Award Competition amongst 4,582 entries from Primary and 

Secondary schools in every London borough. The Fourth Plinth competition Is organised by the Mayor of London and The

Arts Council England.

 

This was an entire Lower School CDLY P research project, inspired by the work of Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz and

his Fourth Plinth artwork. A discursive, child-centric and child-led project using 12kg of clay, the Infants and Juniors, aged 4-7

(Early Years / Reception, Year 1, and Year 2), “co-designly” created replacement artefacts for the destroyed National Museum

of Iraq. We mixed volcanic ash from the 1979 eruption of the Soufrière Volcano in St Vincent Into our clay, used a can of chop-

ped tomatoes and cotton wool (for the volcano and plume), plus “kelly green, Marx 1971, American Gi” plastic soldiers. 

 

We researched the Iraq War’s impact on the National Museum of Iraq, the concept of a museum (we put together a Basic Mus-

eum Kit), the Japanese art of Kintsugi repair, and the nature and structure of volcanoes. We researched oral histories of children

caught up, evacuated, and put under 1-4-month curfew (lockdown) while temporarily housed in public buildings, schools, and churches during the St Vincent, Soufrière Volcano eruption of 1979 and its aftermath. “Putting ourselves in their shoes” we wrote narrative descriptions of what it was like. (As a very young child, I too was amongst many hundreds of thousands caught in the periphery of the eruption. Volcanic ash suddenly blacked-out and smothered everything. After 24 hours of choking black, the

sky cleared grey. My brother and I swept some ash into an empty jar of Tang as (forensic) evidence to take back to school when

we relayed our epic story.)

 

Very coincidentally, as a group of “co-researchers”, the Lower School had intuitively prepared for the Covid-19 pandemic and Lockdown, and, also bizarrely presciently, the eruption of the Soufrière Volcano in 2021, after 42 years dormancy.

 

CDLY P has an ethic of care modality, in this project arts-design practice was cathartic using symbolism, metaphor, and imagin-

ation to express and process individual and collective trauma and is about learning to adapt constructively and resiliently to

threat, pervasive uncertainty, and significant change.

 

This project was on the walls during an Ofsted School Inspection and the inspector commented that it was “a terrific, but quite controversial project”, most likely because it covered the themes of war and violent destruction, resilience, healing, and repair through child-centric phenomenologies.

 

We all worked together intuitively and discursively, and it became a holistic, multifaceted (and oftentimes curiously digressive)

project that bridged anthropological cultures, ancient, and modern histories, and phenomenological narratives via the concept

and loci of the museum.