SCRAPBOOK is stunning photo-book, a citywide and onsite photographic exhibition – the result of a year’s collaboration between Esther and the children comming to a weekly photo-club at Bristol’s legendary St Paul’s Adventure Playground.

SCRAPBOOK is testament to the infinite qualities of mucking around. It is a portal into the telling world of child’s play, upside/downing, risk, creation, kinship, destruction, art, and story as the world keeps on spinning.

Photos and artworks were exhibited on poster boards, so that black & white collages beamed against the colourful structures of the loved playground. The work revealed is an inspirational guide to see what happens when ‘play is the place’ and ‘each one teaches one’. Both the book and exhibition attests to the crucial work of the Playground and all who support the vital need for everybody to muck around and make things up.

Interview here with Bristol Photo Festival and more from Arcca here.

Stuff we did:

• Made cardboard cities and cameras with artist David Hopkinson

• Jumped and flew and captured the moment

• Sat around and looked at photo books and talked about how a picture make us feel and why

• Made books, like ‘How to Make a Mess’ or ‘How to Scare People’ with the Art Librarian, Annabel Other

• Dressed up, posed and made galleries with frames

• Took cameras apart

• Designed fantasy cameras with artist, Joff Winterhart

• Joined in when mothers and aunties, using the sewing machines, burst into song and drummed

• Collaged, scrawled over and photographed again until something multi-layered and polyphonic emerged.