Leeds Art Gallery - Play in Playground

Taking a different collection artwork as a focus, it invites children and adults to use and combine senses through a variety of activities designed to stimulate imagination and encourage creative responses. To date amongst other activities, we have drawn ‘on' bricks then drawn ‘with' bricks, travelled on a summer magic carpet, built huge cardboard box towers and tunnels to clamber through, caught stripes on our bodies and then danced in coloured lines, as well as explored snow and ice by marks with ice pastels. Anthony Gormley's Brick Man, Gillian Ayres Helios, Winter Palace by Bridget Riley, Extended Cube by David Nash and Andy Goldsworthy's Ice Arch have all inspired fantastic meetings with art.

For very people to gain confidence in themselves as learners, explorers, discoverers and critical thinkers, Playground events are focussed on everyone having fun and learning within the Gallery. We aim to be so successful that our participants return for more as their interests develop or feel that they can come to the Gallery whenever they like. Artspace, our special interactive space, provides specific activities for all of our visitors linked to our exhibitions or collection artworks, including very young people, should they decide to drop-in.

We have had on one occasion 62 participants and are pleased that there are on average 34. Our next step is to develop strategies for evaluating and consulting with our participants and use what we find out to develop inspiring new things to explore and make using sound, movement, stories, mark-making and story-telling.