The Buzzards have been working with members of the Sandford Heritage Group to design a 21st century bench end for St.
Swithun’s church.
The groups visited the church together to look at the existing bench ends – most of which are thought to be about 500 years old. They
found that many of them had intricate designs of foliage surrounding many different images of faces – some of them based on the ancient idea of the Green Man – which represents ideas of growth and fertility.
After the church visited the children made their own drawings of the bench ends to start to get some understanding of how they had been designed and made. Then working in groups they all came up with their own ideas of what might be included in a modern day bench end. They thought about all the things that represent our time, and there were many ideas surrounding mobile phones, PSPs, computers, space travel, cars, war, sustainability as well as thoughts about growth, plants and leaves.
The Heritage Group wanted to include ideas from each person, so it was decided to select images from each design, cut them out and scale them up. The Buzzards were then asked to think about the change in scale between their own A4 designs, and the size and shape of an actual life size bench end. Each group of about six people drew up a ‘cartoon’ which is a word that originally meant ‘life size drawing’, and decided how to divide up the space so that they could incorporate as many ideas as possible. They set about making a collage of drawings to convey their ideas about contrasting the contemporary and ancient world. They had to consider ideas of basic design, so that ideas were incorporated in a pleasing way.
Penny Somerville, a local artist, explained that this is the process that an artist goes through in order to design something that is specific to a particular place.
Six life sized designs, or ‘cartoons’ were developed and everyone will be asked to vote to choose the one that they think is best.
