Client: Project Motorhouse + Turner Contemporary

Arts Programme Managers: Janet Fielding + Jo Mapp, Project Motorhouse

Specialist Manufacturers / Consultants: Carly Birkett Key Account Manager VGL

Project Consultants: Turner Contemporary + The Wooden Box Gallery

Creative Collaborators: Jo Mapp + Photographer Tim Topple + 21 Year 7 students from the Royal Harbour Academy, Ramsgate

The 'Fantastical Worlds' installation landed at Turner Contemporary, Margate as part of an exhibition which opened on 22nd October 2022. The Fantastical Worlds artworks were a part of a Warm Bank and Art Library for children and families established in the Clore Learning Space at Turner until January 8th, 2023. 

Delivered by Project MotorHouse project directors Janet Fielding, Jo Mapp, working with Year 8 pupils at Royal Harbour Academy, Ramsgate alongside Photographer Tim Topple. I was commissioned to work with all the outcomes and aspirations of the children to create a celebratory and fantastical landscape in Ramsgate with the children featuring as the main cast. 

This exhibition was first installed at The Wooden Box Gallery in Gallery, Ramsgate in June 2022. 

The workshops with Year 8 pupils were carried out during the half term holiday which coincided with the Town’s celebrations of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee on 1-5th June 2022. It was a colourful, musical, creative, chaotic & celebratory time, reflected in the brilliant work delivered by the group. The children & adults both couldn’t help but be caught up in the action. We threw open the windows of our base at Customs House, let the sun and sounds flood in. Some children joined the parade, whilst others recorded the event. A quick break to the beach for a paddle became a sea-soaked exuberant adventure. 

21 students formed the cast of a fantastical outdoor performance, an ensemble of assorted young characters, who, through imagination and creativity via workshops in Photography and Collage led by the Project MotorHouse team, made images which inspired a new vision of Ramsgate, both otherworldly and strange, yet familiar, in which our cast lead a magical performance inspired by real events and Alice in Wonderland & comic fantasy. 

Chaos, noise, joy, play, focus, with much creative vision and hundreds of images later, our library of photographs was finally assembled. Ramsgate architecture, plants, plastic animals, a pink flamingo and of course, our cast of 21, rocking all manners of surreal poses, jumps, weird juxtapositions & self-portraits, have been reimagined, flying, flocking, splashing, sliding in a series of Fantastical Ramsgate artworks realised as the giant-sized pages from books, a real pop-up fantasy.

Beneath looming skyscrapers, a shock of animal and flower-headed characters prance and parade, darting over the rooftops, crowding the streets with colour and spectacle, filling the skies like a winter murmuration of starlings. Familiar but dreamlike. High tides rage and waves crash over the harbour to flood the town.

Sperm whales sleep upright in the sky, whilst a golden Brontosaurus dangles from the neck of a dog-faced boy. Towering plants touch the clouds, pink skies are pierced by a monolithic granite obelisk three miles high. On yellow-tinted streets, a child colossus bestrides the town. Wave-washed seaside landscapes of strangeness & creativity conjured from the imaginations of children.