HOUSES FOR ANGELS

Houses for Angels is the second ILB community art project involving Romanian and British artists. It was implemented between June 17 and 30, 2007 at the children centre of the Saint Macrina Foundation.
Over a period of two weeks, 10 artists worked with children and developed two installations and a mural painting for decorating the new building of the center, based on the ideas, objects and drawings created during previous workshops with the children.

The project was delivered by artists from the I love Bucharest team together with artists from Free Form Arts Trust in London. It was coordinated by Alina Tudor.

Artists: Sarah Hammond, Jhinuk Sarkar, Robert Worley, Andrew Dwyer, Joel Parkes, Alina Tudor, Razvan Neagoe, Virginia Toma, Liviu Crihan, Irina Abaza.

The project began with a series of workshops where children created elements that were later integrated in the three final works of the project. Their creativity and imagination was rewarded with a skills certificate, sweets, juice, two decorative installations for the garden and a mural painting.

MOBILE - The theme of the first series of modelling workshops was "angel wings" and the aim was to produce a sculptural mobile suspended for garden view, inspired by the artist Alexander Calder. Children were shown how to create three-dimensional shapes of bent aluminium wire that they then decorated with coloured glass and ceramic beads. The works of children were then incorporated into a large-scale form of a suspended cell, made by artists.

INSTRUMENT - For the second series of workshops, the children made drawings reproducing sea creatures and shells, which were then made into three-dimensional wax models for a large sculpture. Wax models were then cast in an alloy of tin and lead by artists at the centre of Saint Macrina. The works of art created by children were incorporated by artists into a mobile sculpture with a frame made of wood, metal and wire-recycled materials found at the centre.

HOUSES FOR ANGELS - the painting on the ceiling of the centre has as a subject the "house". It began with another series of workshops where children drew and painted their image of a "home for angels". After a series of working meetings, four Romanian and three English artists began painting the ceiling of the new building of the Centre of Saint Macrina Foundation in Bucharest, based on the drawings of the children. The final concept took the form of a ring of houses that hold hands. The houses are painted based on children's drawings and artistic inspiration.