Our mentor, Alice mcLean, writes about their projects with students at Haberdashers’ during 2024–25.

During the autumn term, I worked on a project with year 7 students to create giant jewellery sculptures. The students spent a few weeks researching inspiration and designed their ideas, then we embarked on several weeks of trialling different materials such as mod roc and papier mache. The final pieces were large beaded necklaces (papier mache balloons) which were decorated in various bright patterns, inspired by the work of Peter Blake, Yinka Ilori and Camille Walala. These were suspended from the ceiling during our Creative Mentors exhibition at the Pickle Factory.

During the October half term, we trialled a 2 day holiday art school. I worked with a group of year 11 students. The theme was ‘Environment’, so our project was focused on zooming in and looking closely at the environment around us at the local park. Students took photos, frottaged, and then used a 2 part silicone mould to capture a texture in the park that they particularly liked. We then cast this in pewter. The students also practiced some basic jewellery techniques and some of them created jewellery from found materials.

One of my final projects was working on supporting students create a new visual library of social stories for the school. I worked with 2 groups of KS3 students, a mix of neurodiverse and some supportive peers. We researched the most commonly used words for social stories and created some simple images that to represented these words or instructions. Students then translated these into a ‘Haberdashers style’ by mono printing the images in various colours. Students seemed to really enjoy the process and the SEN staff were really pleased with the outcomes.