Charity helps to transform junk into playground sculptures

Litter picking is a punishment usually dished out in school detention, but at Windale Community Primary School, Oxford, pupils are being encouraged to fill their playground with rubbish.

All 230 pupils took part in a project to transform junk material into a giant outdoor bumble-bee sculpture.

Art education charity Kids at Art provided artist Tom Cox to work with the children during the five-day project.

Becci Man, arts co-ordinator at the school in Blackbird Leys, was first inspired to start the project by the junk and scrap sculptures at Cornwall's ecological attraction, The Eden Project.

She said: "We have tried to use this project as a way of raising awareness about recycling, so they can see that art isn't just something they do in the classroom with paints.

"It was all done on a low budget."

The children collected a lot of the material themselves, like plastic bottles and food packaging.

The rest came from the Orinoco scrapstore, based at the Bullingdon Community Centre, Headington.

Store manager and environmental campaigner Howie Watkins, best known for presenting BBC TV's Really Wild Show, believes a pile of waste can stimulate the imagination of children far more than a crisp new sheet of art paper and an expensive paint-set.

He said: "The great thing about using scrap is that you never quite know what you're going to find to use. Once you've found your scrap, you've got the fun of working out how to make things out of it. Then you let children loose on it and unexpected, wonderful things happen.

"Sticky tape, foam, waste fabric and plastic becomes: bees, trees, flowers, space-ships.

"By allowing children to be creative in three dimensions with unusual materials we are able to teach them that art isn't something that artists do, tucked away in studios, but something we can all have a go at. Something that we can all enjoy and even be good at."

Ms Man said: "I knew precisely what I wanted, someone who really knew their junk and would help me show the children that art isn't about working indoors with paper and pens but about working in three dimensions, indoors and outdoors, with all kinds of materials."

So Mr Watkins delved into his "Aladdin's Cave" of junk to help them find some materials they could use.

"Becci wanted to make mad flowers and big insects that would survive being sited outside," he explained. "We've got loads of brightly-coloured nylon off-cuts and ripstop nylon kite material, plastic sunglasses holders which are great for insect eyes sticks, foam, plastic bits and bubble wrap."

Orinoco rescues scrap from land-fill sites and sells the material off cheaply. It runs workshops for schools, businesses and community groups about how to transform scrap into unusual art and will also visit companies to inspect their scrap and find out whether it can be re-used.

"We help businesses reduce their environmental impact, promote recycling and make unusual art activities a practical reality," Mr Watkins explained.

"The use of materials and construction elements of many scrap-art projects link nicely into the design, technology and art curricula. It doesn't end there, however, as there are plenty of links into English and maths: looking at where the waste materials that are being used came from originally, recording the amount of waste currently tipped.

"In looking at resource use and focusing on reducing waste, re-using materials and recycling items. This scrap project manages to provide genuine cross-curricular environmental education."