Summer Youth Sessions 2026: Making, Moving, Noticing
Over two weeks in August, St Anne’s House hosted a series of creative workshops for young people aged 8–18, bringing together artists, makers, food, nature and opportunities to explore beyond the usual spaces of school and home.
Rather than working towards a single outcome, the sessions offered different ways into making: through clay, wire, sound, mapping, movement and observation. Across the programme, young people were encouraged to experiment, follow their curiosity and see what could emerge through working with materials and with one another.
In Faces from Clay, young people worked with Dan from Community Pottery to build exaggerated ceramic portraits using slabs of clay, experimenting with shape, texture, layering and colourful slips.
The process made space for playful interpretations of the face rather than aiming for realism – each piece becoming part of a collective portrait of the group.
Artist Mailies Fleming’s Postcards from Pigeons took a different approach to looking. Through a creative walk around St Anne’s, participants collected sounds, textures and observations, considering the neighbourhood from a more-than-human perspective.
These fragments were brought together into a collaborative map and soundscape, asking what becomes visible when we shift our point of view.
With Jo Chalkblack, wire became a way of thinking through form and movement. Young people bent and shaped wire into sculptures for the planters outside St Anne’s House, alongside planting wildflowers and herbs for pollinators.
The work sits somewhere between sculpture, gardening and collective stewardship – contributing to a space that will continue to change after the workshop itself has finished.
Morgane Sha’ban’s Kinetic Mobiles explored another kind of movement, using balance, tension, gravity and air as starting points for making.
Working from observations of the natural environment, participants constructed moving sculptures that responded to their surroundings rather than remaining fixed.
The programme also extended beyond the workshop space, with young people visiting the Aardman exhibition at M Shed and spending a day together at Brean. These experiences are an important part of the wider youth programme at St Anne’s House: creative activity doesn’t have to begin and end at the workbench, and making can be a route into noticing the places, people and environments around us.
Across the sessions, there was no expectation of a particular kind of finished work. Instead, the emphasis was on trying things out, learning through materials and allowing ideas to develop through the process.
For us, this is an important part of what creative youth provision can offer: a space where young people can be curious, make decisions, work alongside others and encounter unfamiliar ways of thinking and making.
