Education Work

 

At the King's Lynn's Festival we aim to provide a mix of community workshops & education projects which give exciting opportunities to work with a variety of artists. Working throughout the years to develop our educational programmes and projects, the following highlight some of our past amazing community-based achievements.

To stay informed and discover information on our new and upcoming projects be sure to regularly check this page, with further details listed on our “ What’s On” page.

If you are interested in booking any of these workshops for you, your school or your family please contact t King's Lynn Festival on 01553 767557.

We are pleased to offer 50% discounts for under 25s on the majority of our concert tickets.  This initiative is supported by  The Ruth Fermoy Memorial Fund.


Recent Projects:

  • Schools Workshop/Coffee Concert - Maxim Calver: February 2023

    BBC Young Musician finalist, Maxim Calver visited Eastgate Academy Primary School in King's Lynn following his performance at the Festival's Spring series of coffee concerts on Friday 3rd February. He performed to the pupils and answered their questions about the cello and his life as a musician. 

  • Primary School Workshops - Black Umfolosi: Summer 2022

    In September 2022 we delivered primary school workshops in Walpole Cross Keys and Nelson Academy, Downham Market with Black Umfolosi.  Sessions were supported by PEACH West Norfolk (LCEP) through funding linked to their Barbican Box project, which enabled schools to access sessions for free.  KLF then offered heavily subsidised tickets to their evening performance for participating children and their parents. The group taught dance steps and vocal parts introducing participants to traditional Zimbabwean styles resulting in a rewarding and memorable experience. 

    A total of 75 children took part in workshops which were then shared with other members of the school reaching a further 200+ children.  The group gave fascinating insights about where they live and their background – making the whole experience enlightening, informative and entertaining. 

  • Schools Workshops/Coffee Concert Performance - Passacaglia Trio: Spring 2022

    Spring 2022 saw the Passacaglia Trio visit Whitefriars Primary school following their Coffee Concert performance.  An entertaining and highly interactive assembly-style performance saw the trio perform for around 200+ children.  Demonstrating the musical range of their individual period instruments, they performed excerpts from their early music repertoire, gave historical context and took questions from the children.

  • Festival Exhibition Family Day: July 2022

    The Family Day included storytelling sessions, Lino Cut workshops and badge making. Louise Tiplady ran two Lino Cut sessions aimed at families (6yrs +).  The sessions were to broaden the ways in which people could engage with the Festival exhibition and prior to both sessions Tiplady, guided participants around the Fermoy Gallery explaining the art works and themes. She then guided participants through design, technique, and execution of their own lino cuts which they were able to take home with them.

    "Thank you so much for a wonderful morning of creativity! Please repeat this workshop. We all had such a fabulous time and it was great to see the exhibition first for inspiration and then create our own master pieces! Thanks again!"

  • Schools Workshops/Coffee Concert Performance - Magnard Ensemble: November 2019​

Year 5 pupils from St Edmunds Primary Academy took part in a creative music project. The pupils worked closely with local composer Jane Wells and professional musicians Jonathan Farey, horn, & bassonist, Catriona McDermid. The musicians worked with the children at the school introducing them to classical music and allowing them to create their own musical piece called ‘Dreamtime’ which was inspired by a piece of music called Traumerei by Schumann.

Their work was then shared with pupils at a school assembly and then again at a public Festival Coffee Concert in the Town Hall. After performing the children sat and listened to the Magnard Ensemble perform some classical music pieces from some of the world’s most famous classical composers.   
    

  • Workshop - Kure Kure/Faraway with
    Anna Mudeka: 25 October 2019

​Anna Mudeka led a family-friendly workshop of mbira singing, learning to play the shakers and Zimbabwean dancing as part of her Kure Kure / Faraway tour. An uplifting, re-energising and soul-fulfilling experience, suitable for all ages and abilities. This was a precursor of her performance later that evening and participants got the chance to have
an intimate Q&A session whilst in the physically engaging workshop. 

 

  • Scroll Through Lynn Exhibition: 2 - 23 November 2019

The Scroll Through Lynn Exhibition was the community and schools project that was created to accompany our Painting the Personal Exhibition. Scroll was produced, again, in partnership with Stories of Lynn and was the culmination of numerous workshops based at Stories and local schools. 

Holly Meadows pupils visited the SOL museum to create wonderful 3D houses as part of a street scene, and also to concentrate on the houses of local artist Sir Walter Dexter.

Young people working with Kick The Dust took photographs of their journey from the College of West Anglia to SOL specially for the exhibition. They curated the exhibition alongside SOL and members of a group which meet at the YMCA also created some images in the style of Andy Warhol – forever connected to King’s Lynn by his famous Campbell’s Soup can images.  

In additional workshops, adults from the University of the Third Age painted alongside school children on joint artworks, and through an open event at the 11th Hour Festival, a silkscreen painting was created by drop-in visitors. 

 

Exhibition Work:

  • Gustav Metzger Exhibition: June-July 2019 

An exhibition of work by internationally renowned artist, Gustav Metzger was shown in the Fermoy Gallery featuring works created while living in King’s Lynn between 1950 and 1959. Students from NMS Kick the Dust Project helped to hang the exhibition giving them first-hand experience of the processes and work involved. 

The newspaper installation in the Red Barn aimed to engage the public by restaging Metzger’s participatory project Mass Media (2011/2019), this prompted interesting discussion and focus points. Local primary schools and a local community group attended workshops which involved a guided tour of the exhibitions, discussions about Metzger’s life & art, a look at newspapers and what they mean
to us today and the restaging of an old photograph of Metzger in his studio. 

Groundwork Gallery also organised a Study Day in partnership with King’s Lynn Festival entitled ‘Fragile Nature’ which looked at art and the environment. It focused on Metzger but also looked at other artists with strong environmental influences.
 

  • Connect Exhibition: 13 April - 4 May 2019

Rachael Williams from Stories of Lynn ran a
series of workshops with classes from Heacham, West Walton and Clenchwarton primary schools using archive maps as a starting point for
artwork & linocut prints which formed the core
of the Connect exhibition.

Featuring over 90 pieces of work by local school children these works were also shown alongside works created in community open-access workshops. The exhibition featured interactive connection games and tile printing for visitors to express their thoughts on the displayed works. 

Connect Exhibition related art activities – run in partnership with Stories of Lynn (March –April 2019) included Cutting the Cuts, C-c-c-cARTography and Map Archive Open Day. 
 

  • Up Town Exhibition: 12 October – 3 November 2018

The Place exhibition in the Fermoy Gallery examined how artists explore and engage with the concept of place.  This exhibition presented the perfect opportunity for pupils from local primary school, St Michael’s Church of England School, to exhibit their own work which was inspired by the town in which they live. 

Led by Rachel Williams of Norfolk Museum Service, work was selected, framed and presented in a professional gallery environment.  Rachel went on to add interactive visitor activities aimed at young people which linked the school exhibition to the Place Exhibition. 

Up Town Exhibition related art activities – Art Before Bed Time, Matchstick Men & Matchstick Cats and Dogs, Arts Society children’s workshop (October 2018).
 

Coffee Concert Work and Schools Performances: 

As part of our Year Round programme in November 2016 pupils from St Martha's Catholic Primary School at our Coffee Concert, where they performed with the Snowden-Sir Duo.

Following this success in November 2017, pupils from St Michael's Academy worked with flautist Anna Rosa Mari and violinist Kamila Bydlowska on a piece based on a traditional Hungarian Czardas and inspired by the rhythms of things the pupils longed for (unicorns-and-ice-cream!)

Since then we have continued to work with Norfolk Music Hub's Jessica Berners and local composer and musician Jane Wells to support classical music workshops in local primary schools supported by Arts Council England. Every November, we feature the results of the hard work of local young musicians at our Coffee Concerts, where the pupils and the professional musicians do a short performance ahead of the main programme. 

Whitefriars Primary School Music Project - November 2018
The School took part in a music composition project culminating in a short performance during a Festival Coffee Concert. The pupils worked closely with Norfolk-based composer, Jane Wells, along with Sarah Thurlow (clarinet) and Sarah Harris (viola) from the visiting Contemporary Consort; who were joined on the last day by pianist, Jonathan Musgrave, to perform the full Coffee Concert
The starting point theme, around which the children created original musical ideas, was 'characters in a landscape'. This idea took its inspiration from a piece in the concert programme for solo clarinet - Arlequin (Cahuzac).  The children from across KS2 worked hard for two days to realise their imaginative ideas in sound using a variety of instruments including violins, temple blocks and rototoms. On the concert day they performed their 10-minute piece within the one-hour programme and then went on to listen to the consort perform music by Mozart, Schumann, Bruch and Vaughan Williams. This was the first time that many of the children had attended a classical music concert. 

Fontanella Schools Performance All Saint’s 
Church (April 2019) 
Local primary school, Whitefriars, brought along Year 3 children to attend an hour-long interactive performance. Many of the children were studying the recorder, so the array of different recorders & historical music provided
a new perspective on the instrument. With conducting, singing and mindfulness colouring activities the children were entertained and attentive throughout.

 

Previous Projects:

  • Map Archive Open Day: 27 April 2019

To accompany the EXTRA weekend the BCKLWN archive was opened from 10am – 2pm to allow people free access to antique maps, slideshows and material – the Borough Archivist was available to talk through the works and displays. 
 

  • Workshop - C-c-c-cARTography with Rachael Williams & 

Rebecca Hearle: 27 April 2019

Over the EXTRA weekend, we ran both an adult and children’s linocut workshop which featured a visit to the Fermoy Gallery exhibitions for inspiration, followed by hands-on activities in Stories of Lynn. All workshops were run with professional artist Rebecca Hearle and Rachael Williams
 
  • Workshops For All - Cutting the Cuts!: 30 March 2019

A jointly promoted workshop day run from 10am–4pm with Stories of Lynn and Rebecca Hearle. Works were created here and then displayed in the Connect Exhibition. This day provided some of the core linocut printing work for the exhibition.  
 

  • Children's Workshop - Matchstick Men and Matchstick Cats and Dogs: 19 October 2018

​Rachael Williams, led two hands-on art workshops using the Place Exhibition as a source of inspiration. Young people explored Lowry’s work “Landscape with Farm Buildings”, and then went on to produce local landscapes and street scenes using tissue paper strips. 
 

  • Children's Workshop - Lost and Found with Alison Dunhill: 13 October 2018​​

Children attending this workshop were encouraged to go rummaging through their old bits and pieces at home and find little hidden treasures no bigger than a 50p - they brought buttons, badges, and pieces of ribbon. Artist, Alison Dunhill, then provided a material called ‘wondermesh’ which they could use to stick or sew their items into creating their own unique cloud.  Hanging their cloud in the workshop to see a new piece of art. This workshop encouraged the children to look at old objects in a new way, getting them to consider that things once ‘lost’ to them could be re-found in a new guise. 
 

  • Family Event - Art Time Before Bedtime: 12 October 2018

​Art Time Before Bedtime was a new and experimental evening workshop. Starting at Stories of Lynn Museum, with a walk through historic King’s Lynn looking at some of the Lumiere buildings, visitors were then given a tour of the Place Exhibition at the Fermoy Gallery before walking back through the town. Once at Stories of Lynn there was the opportunity to make a tissue paper skyline inspired by L.S. Lowry. This was followed by hot chocolate and stories.
 

  • Pump It Up - Wind Pipe Organ Project: 7 to 12 October 2018

Sarah Kenchinghton (artist, maker, musician & performer) brought her wonderful, unique Wind Pipe Organ to King's Lynn for 6 days of workshops and music-making. The organ workshops took place in St Nicholas' Chapel which was the perfect venue for this beautiful instrument
School Workshops (KS2): Participating schools created their own musical composition on this colourful instrument and then explored how sound is generated through organ pipes by making their own instrument to take away. 
Family Workshop: Families were welcomed to this interactive workshop to create beautiful music on this uniquely colourful and fascinating instrument. 
 
  • Family Workshops - Heritage Open Day: 16 September 2018

The West Norfolk Artist Association in partnership with King's Lynn Festival put together a wonderful range of family art activities to celebrate Heritage Day; including drop-in creative sessions for all ages, including:

Heritage Photo Treasure Trail with Cynthia Jackson; Heritage Banner - PVA Photo Printing with  Esther Boehm; Magical Morphing Plasticine Sculpture with Tom Sharp; Restoring Photographs Using Digital Software with Jo Halpin-Jones; Painting on Silk - Demonstration by Helena Anderson; Painting after a Stroke - Demonstration workshop by Maxine Byron; Make a Mosaic with John and Helen Walker; and Handmade Prints Without a Press with Kit Price Moss.
 

Funding

Image result for adrian flux logo After being awarded the Flux Family Fund to expand our education programme festival team member Louise has taken on the role of Education Worker, meeting with music education specialists in Norfolk to see how we can work together to improve music-making and performance opportunities in local primary schools. 
 
Contact theBox Office now 01553 764864