A whole-school participatory drawing event involving more than 500 pupils, using the game of Consequences to generate collaborative characters and imagery for a public art project at Gayhurst Community School, Hackney.
Introduction
As part of a public art commission for Gayhurst Community School in Hackney, Tom Pearman developed a large-scale participatory drawing project based on the traditional game of Consequences.
The event brought together more than 500 pupils, with children across the school contributing to a collective drawing activity designed to generate unexpected characters, combinations and visual ideas.
The project formed part of The Big Draw Festival 2015, responding to that year’s theme, Every Drawing Tells a Story.
The game of Consequences
Consequences is a collaborative drawing game in which an image is created in stages.
One participant draws a head, the drawing is concealed and passed on; another adds the body without seeing what came before; and a final participant completes the legs.
When the finished drawing is unfolded, the separate contributions combine to reveal an unexpected composite character.
Tom used this simple mechanism as the basis for a much larger collective artwork, allowing hundreds of individual drawings to become part of a shared visual experiment.
Guinness World Record attempt
The school event was also conceived as an attempt to establish a Guinness World Record for the largest game of Consequences.
Every pupil and teacher was invited to participate, turning a familiar classroom drawing activity into a coordinated whole-school event.
The emphasis was not simply on scale, but on creating a shared experience in which hundreds of individual contributions could combine to generate something unpredictable and collectively authored. The project was publicised in advance as a Guinness World Record attempt; I would retain the word attempt unless you have confirmation that a record was formally awarded.
From drawings to public art
The hundreds of drawings generated during the event provided a rich source of material for Tom’s wider public art project at the school.
The commission explored the idea of Consequences, misfits and hybrid characters in relation to the cultural diversity, architecture and communities of Hackney and wider London.
Rather than asking pupils to produce designs for a predetermined artwork, the collaborative process allowed unexpected combinations and visual accidents to become the starting point for the developing work.
Participation
The project used a deliberately simple drawing activity so that pupils of different ages and abilities could contribute on equal terms.
By separating each character into head, body and legs, individual authorship became less important than the collective outcome. The final drawings belonged to several participants at once, reflecting the collaborative nature of the wider public art project.
Project archive
A dedicated project website documents The Main Event, the Consequences drawings and the wider Gayhurst Community School project:
