Kindness Rocks

Kindness Rocks

Year 9 GCSE Art students from Weydon School participated in the first of a series of workshops entitled ‘Kindness Rocks’ organised by the University of the Creative Arts (UCA) in Farnham. The workshops are part of UCA’s Surrey Galleries programme to celebrate Farnham’s October Craft month and were made possible by a grant from Farnham South Street Trust.

The project celebrates that each one of us is unique with our own personality and characteristics.

This series of workshops aims to raise awareness for empathy through poetry and visual art. Farnham children of all ages from six local schools are invited to creatively respond to the concept of kindness by drawing, writing, painting, gluing, using clay and other materials on rocks/pebbles. These rocks communicating kindness will be little treasures of positivity, inspiration or just acknowledgment of difficult emotions or experience.

Once complete, the rocks will be collected and displayed in a public area in Farnham.

The facilitator of the ‘Kindness Rocks’ project is Dr Vicky Samara who works as a Learning Support Assistant at Weydon School and is a local resident, poet and genetic scientist. After publishing her poetry book and having an interactive installation at South Hill Park Art Centre in Bracknell, she wanted to further explore ways of communicating poetry expressing feelings. Having worked with an illustrator for her book and the installation, Samara saw that while the unique sketches perfectly framed her words, in fact the dialog between text and image was unique to each reader. This is what the community is being asked to do here: depict visually what kindness is to them; what colour does it have; what pattern; what texture?

Dame Magdalene Odundo DBE, officially launched Farnham Craft month at UCA Galleries and the rocks created by Weydon students are currently on display in the Foyer Gallery at UCA for everyone to enjoy during a month-long celebration of craft.

Kindness Rocks on UCA's webpage: https://www.uca.ac.uk/events/galleries/kindness-rocks/

photo to be credited to Petar Stipanovic, webdesignrct.co.uk/ e: petar@webdesignrct.co.uk