For 8 years, the Turner Prize winner, Oscar Murillo, has been running an extraordinary project, Frequencies, with over 100,000 school children from around the world. Aged from 10 to 16, the children were given canvases that sat over their desks for six months and they could draw, write or paint whatever they liked. The result was 40,000 canvases from 34 countries.
A review of the exhibition (which was held at Murillo’s old school in Hackney over the summer) by Chris Harvey, Daily Telegraph, found it fascinating. Not only had the canvases taken on the colour of the environment in which they were created (“Red dirt stains those from Ghana, a grey mud colour seeps into others from Mumbai”) but he found that national characteristics also emerged, such as pop culture from Japan while large parts of the Chinese canvases were left untouched, with images confined to one corner; “their clean lines evidence of a calligraphic tradition, Are the children more disciplined – or afraid to splurge their inner lives out in a mess of lines, words and symbols?”
How much of what we create has been formed by our culture and background?
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