Art Night 2017: Charles Avery
Royal London Hospital served as a venue for one of the Art Night projects when the 24-hour event was held in Whitechapel and curated by Fatos Üstek in 2017. The collaboration with Art Night entailed the fly-posting of dozens of images by Charles Avery plastered across hoardings adjacent to the hospitals main entrance.
As an extension of this project with Art Night 2017, the philanthropic organisation, ArtSocial, funded a series of workshops at our school within the Children’s Hospital at the Royal London. Artist and educator Sam Ayre delivered these based on Avery’s ‘The Islanders’ books as a spring board for ideas.
Since 2004 Avery has been working on a project imagining his own island to house all of his thoughts on philosophy, theory and mathematics. The Capital city of this island is called Onomatopoeia, and for Art Night 2017 Avery brought elements of the imaginary to life at St Katharine’s Dock.
Over the course of the sessions Sam Ayre introduced our students to Avery’s Islanders through the book ‘Onomatopoeia – Its People and Surroundings’, which is about the people and culture of the capital, port and gateway to his fictional Island. Students were invite them to make connections between art, philosophy, and their own individual lived experiences, creating a ‘new world’ through discussion, painting, story telling, idea sharing, design, millinery and drawing.
You can see some further images of the workshops on Sam’s website here.
