Poppy Green

"Creativity is for the gifted few: the rest of us are compelled to live in environments constructed by the gifted few, listen to the gifted few's music, use gifted few's inventions and art, and read the poems, fantasies and plays by the gifted few. This is what our education and culture conditions us to believe, and this is a culturally induced and perpetuated lie. The result is that the vast majority of people are not allowed (and worse - feel that they are incompetent) to experiment with the components and variables of the world in order to make experiments and discover new things and form new concepts" - The Theory of Loose Parts, 1972.

 

Destroy is a project about making things. It seeks to provide opportunity to explore the creative process through the destruction and remaking of artworks. It was initiated in 2017 in London by Blank Canvas artist Poppy Green in collaboration with The Bow Arts Trust . She observed the curiosity and excitement generated by the destruction of objects and materials, and the trepidation felt when faced with creation. She decided to explore this and presented a large sculptural work to a group of young people from an inner-city London secondary school. The project ran over three sessions, culminating in a “destructive performance” in which the students were given free rein to destroy her artwork and remake it as they saw fit. The focus of the workshop was for the young people to have a very direct, tactile experience of Green’s work and for them to be positioned as collaborators. Green views this process of destruction and creation as a collaborative performance between artist and participant.

 

Since then, she has run the project in London with the Bow Arts Trust and artists Sid and Jim, and with the City of Melbourne, as a four part series of workshops, exploring her sculptural work and that of local artists Kathy Holowko, George Rose and Alastair Mason.

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