Our Young Advisory Group session four took place on Saturday 9th September jam packed with creativity and ideas. This week our associate writer Mary Branley, associate artist Francesca Hutchinson and assistant writer Sarah O’Keefe hosted the group.

Sarah said of the session  “On September 9th we held our fourth session of the Kids’ Own Youth Advisory Group at the Northside Community Centre in Sligo. It was so nice to have artist Francesa Hutchinson join us again, participants had an opportunity to continue their collaborative fabric sewing project from our last session and add more color, designs, and fun! Francesca also offered the option of layering yarn to glue which gave a different element to the activity. Francesca then shared a very special surprise, the collaborative project including everyone’s work would be displayed at her “Movements of Growth” exhibition at the Leitrim Sculpture Centre Manorhamilton. This created a lot of excitement! We finished our session with giving participants an opportunity to choose whether they wished to continue sewing or try a new activity creating a canvas sketchbook. The canvas sketchbook offered a lot of creative possibilities, one idea was to create a map – a map with Vikings. Tune in to Youth Advisory Group: Creative Session 5 to find out what adventures (and mischief) these Vikings and other new characters get themselves into!”

Mary added, “It was a very relaxed group of 10 or 11 children, they really enjoyed the tapestry and being part of Francesca’s exhibition. Some participants had a few gems about working with real artists and how everyone is so creative, adults and children. Also feels like the pace has picked up in terms of the young people getting stuck into the activities so quickly and time on task extending week by week. They also spoke about liking the options of ways of working, variety of materials and how each artist is different. And that there’s no pressure on them to have the same output.”

Below are some images from Francesca’s exhibition Movements of Growth, featuring the tapestries from the group! The exhibition has now ended.

See more about our Youth Advisory Group here: https://kidsown.ie/projects/kids-own-youth-advisory-group/