CAMHS Marlborough House Adolescent Inpatient Unit, Swindon, September 2017.
We were consulted with an eye on improving this recreation room for youngsters with mental health issues. It was manky magnolia, we could only be onsite for a day, and had to work with a limited budget.
We workshopped to brainstorm ideas: they wanted a life-size zebra on the wall (zebra is a ‘safe-word’ if they’re feeling challenged and need a time out: “watch out, she’s about to go full zebra!”). It was also felt that a tree would bring the outside in.
Estates painted the room clean chalky white and after some visuals, development and approval on final designs, and i got to work creating the installations.
The cosmic zebra: I cut the 3 shapes that made up the whole from recycled MDF, and after undercoating and 2 coats of black, screwed into some vandalised hoarding adjacent to the Decreate studio, and sprayed the giant galactic street art piece over the top…
I then removed the MDF cut-out, painted the stripes over the top in the studio, and returned him to the wall where he dreamt of being a unicorn…
Cosmic zebra was then removed so he could be taken to the Rec Room in Swindon.
In Adobe Photoshop when you remove a layer, the ‘background’ is a grey & white checkerboard pattern, so i painted this where he was…
A typical Decreate detailed touch!
The young people at the facility thought it was really cool when they found out their new addition was part of a large street art graffiti artwork.
The Indoor Tree:
They also really enjoyed painting the leaves for the tree on our installation/workshop day. Under the guidance of the lovely Creative Arts Teacher (Kay O’Sullivan) they had been doing leaf studies in preperation, and were really enthusiastic and engaged with the whole project…
