Working with Creative Partnerships London South, renowned fashion designer Helen Storey and her business partner Caroline Coates created ?The Creative Laboratory,? a unique project that bridges the gap between art, design, science and technology. Helen Storey describes how she developed the lab.
Housed in two classrooms in Churchfield School, The Creative Laboratory is a place for young people, teachers and creative professionals to come together and respond to ?Primitive Streak?, a clothing collection charting the first 1,000 hours of human life. The combination of art and science acts as a catalyst to creative exploration. Combined with Amygdala, a two-metre high hand-made book, which examines creativity as a place of refuge, these two pieces of work have provided the stimuli for developing new ways of learning and teaching.
A guiding principle of the Creative Laboratory was that it should not be seen as purely a science lab or art studio, but as a place where anyone from any discipline could interact with both Primitive Streak and Amygdala and explore creative approaches to teaching and learning. Primitive Streak was an experiment. As a designer, it was unlike anything I had ever undertaken before. While ?Primitive Streak? was being created, I had to deal with feeling out of my depth and trust the process alone, much like the leap of faith and process of learning that children encounter in school every day.
The theme of experimentation became the backdrop to the first Creative Partnerships London South lab. There we invited schools from all over south London to come and use the collection and hear us recount what it took creatively to make it. The pieces were to act as stimuli for others to think differently about the ways in which we teach and learn.
I was most impressed by the depth and richness of the questions raised by students, they seemed to be as much about life and how a creative individual can live in these times as about a curiosity about how art and science connect. For teachers it seemed to offer a way to create new delivery mechanisms across curriculum subjects touching simultaneously on science, art, poetry, 3D design, Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE), female health and broader emotional intelligence.
The results of the Creative Lab have been powerful and have helped new tools for learning to emerge, in part through teachers exchanging subject roles and by using equipment and techniques from each other?s disciplines in novel ways.
