Art certainly imitates life at the New Art Gallery in Walsall, where a children's section is at the very foundation of a brand-new 21m, Lottery-boosted building that opened in February at the top of the Midlands town's high street. Step into the Discovery Gallery just inside the main entrance, and educators will recognise the components of any early years setting, a role-play corner, a dressing-up area, a puppet theatre, a drawing table, a storytelling corner, computer corners, tactile and shape-sorting displays, all linked with original new works by the likes of Damien Hirst and other contemporary artists.
'The gallery should be about play, and how you can learn from play,' says education officer Nicky Boden, who stresses the gallery's principles of accessibility and interaction. She thinks too many galleries for contemporary art have a 'white box' approach, that offers visitors no interpretation of the works to start from. The Discovery exhibits, on the other hand, positively prod children into interpreting them, by acting them out or re-creating them.
Talking-point prompts for adult carers are given in the signs alongside the works, and each offers headphones for listening to a tape of the artist talking about what they do, and sometimes a 3-D image of the artist in action -- 'because an artwork is not just an object, it's a process,' says Nicky. The gallery is aimed at children from pre-school up to Key Stage Two, though all are welcome.
Children can run their fingers along wooden grooves that take them from feely boxes beside miniature sculptures by Elizabeth LeMoine, to display cases revealing what material each sculpture used. They can study an indian-style painting of Walsall market by artist twins Amrit and Rabindra Kaur Singh, and then play at their own market stall selling toy fruit and veg, or place blocks of local buildings on a floor road map. And they can dress up before a mirror in the costumes of people in the portrait 'Diary of a Victorian Dandy' by Yinka Shonibare.
A spell-binding 'light sculpture' by Paul Friedlander, reminiscent of resources for special needs children, allows visitors to manipulate the speed and colour of a light beam wiggling like a string in a tall glass cylinder. A spin painting by Damien Hirst is accompanied by a video of how it was made and fuzzy felt shapes with which children can re-create it on the wall. (The explanatory text makes no mention of Hirst's better-known dead animal works!) The shapes used in Estelle Thompson's abstract paintings are there to hand, in sturdy transparent plastic that children can arrange over light boxes.
The work bound to be most popular with younger visitors is 'Beast', a three-foot-tall sculpture made of a fuzzy blue blanket stitched with brown wool, one loose string dangling from its nose, that looks like a child's bedraggled and beloved soft toy. On the tape, artist Laura Ford talks about her own childhood memories and how they inspire her work -- but, she says, 'When you tell stories you're always mis-remembering.' In one of three storybooks starring Beast nearby, the animal walks out of the gallery to go sightseeing in Walsall, until the other exhibits miss him and call 'Where's Beast?' He goes back in, concluding 'It's best to be where you are loved.'
Children should certainly get the message that they are loved and welcome in the rest of the New Art Gallery, too. The first room in its main Garman Ryan collection is devoted to studies of children by various artists. Nicky Boden says young visitors will like the way the collection is arranged room to room by themes, rather than by particular artists or time periods, though it is diverse and contains works by Van Gogh, Monet, Picasso and Rembrandt. Selected works offer an interactive activity for children, such as jigsaws of the painting or models of the sculpture to re-assemble on low tables beside the work itself.
There is a changing exhibition on the top floor. In the opening weeks this was a themed show called 'Blue: borrowed and new', and nearby shops lent their windows for displays of blue artworks in different materials by children in local primary and special schools. These were made in workshops with the gallery's resident artists after the children listened to stories such as Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister and The Blue Balloon by Mick Inkpen.
The children's gallery, Nicky Boden explains, evolved from an exhibition called 'Start' for ages three to five, based on art in the permanent collection. Another exhibit and workshops called 'Me and You' elicited more feedback from children and teachers, as did a project by the local council which brought in young children with parents who had had little experience of art galleries, or had thought 'it wasn't for them', Nicky says.
The ideas gleaned from all of these about how to present art to children have culminated in the Discovery Gallery today, with something extra arising in the process. Or, as a quotation by painter Josef Albers imprinted in the floor of the children's gallery says, 'In science one plus one is two but in art it can be three'.
