Creative connections: Southwark and Lambeth

This year’s exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in this series which pairs up an artist with London schools to explore the gallery’s collection to learn about people who have lived in their area and produce an art work based on this study/

This year’s artist was Simon Terrill and the schools were St Saviours and St Olav’s Southwark. The work produced was a massive photograph entitled “South of the River: Crowd Theory” in which the children posed in groups around the school inspired by the figures they had studied. It was taken with a large format camera which took a shot every 10 minutes from dawn till dusk to produce a single sheet, long exposure work. This is the latest in a series by Terrill which explore large groups of people in a place that is significant to them.

It was s striking picture but you couldn’t see the detail of the poses the children had taken to see how these responded to the people they’d studied which included an international footballer, a hip hop artist, the inventor of the Gaia Theory and a Victoria Cross winner. This meant that it seemed to slightly loose the point of the study. I think other years have fulfilled the brief better but maybe not produced such a good work of art. Swings and roundabouts!

Closes 6 September 2016.

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