Alice Myers

Alice Myers works with photography, sound and video to engage with specific communities and places using her role as an outsider to observe how events unfold around the camera. These spaces have included prisons and refugee camps, and  most recently schools, exploring the different ways that artists might work within institutions. Alice lives in Edinburgh and lectures at the University of Cumbria. You can see more of her work here.

We invited Alice to take up her residency at the Abbeyhill Primary School playground during playtime and make work in response to the ‘loose parts’ – ordinary objects that children can reconfigure in hundreds of ways, constructing their own play environments. Alice started by photographing the way the pupils use the space and the loose parts objects within it. 

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The artist became particularly interested in the highly visual game of hide and seek. The camera then became part of the play as children followed a photographic scavenger hunt, exploring the playground space in new ways.

 

 

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Working alongside their artist-in-residence, the Primary 4 pupils then made collages with their photographs, imagining fantastical playgrounds and bringing them to life. Finally, Alice gathered the fragments of photographs that the pupils had discarded when making their collages, using these to create new images fascinated by visibility and invisibility. The photographs themselves became ‘loose parts’ open to new meanings and endless rearrangements.  

 

 

For the Colony of Artists festival weekend, Alice selected 50 images from the project and printed them on postcards which were hidden around the school for pupils and their grown ups to seek. Visitors were thus invited to play the hide and seek game and contribute to the artwork by finding one and following the instructions on the back! The best contributions were then selected by the artist to be featured on the dedicated gallery wall located in the arts and craft classroom which also doubled up as the popular pop-up art cafe during the festival weekend.

 

 

 

“It was so inspiring to work alongside Alice, our playground resident artist! It encouraged us to use our loose parts playtime much more creatively! We are so pleased that the Loose Parts artwork we co-created with Alice will remain on the ‘gallery walls’ at our school well after its premiere at the Colony of Artists festival. So proud of our enduring collaborative effort” Abi Flowers, Primary 4 Class Teacher 

 

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Alice Myers’ artist’s residency at Abbeyhill Primary School in session 2018/19 was curated by Iliyana Nedkova as part of the ongoing residency programme for professional artists at the school established in 2013 | Facilitated by Abi Flowers, Sally Ketchin and Jeanette Wynn | Supported by East Edinburgh Neighbourhood Partnership Community Grant | Abbeyhill Primary School and Abbeyhill Primary School Parent Council
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