Lauren Child - The Foundling Museum

An exhibition film for the Quentin Blake: Gifted exhibition at the Foundling Museum in collaboration with Lauren Child

What do you think about when you think about nothing?

Alongside the exhibition Quentin Blake: Gifted, the Foundling Museum invited children's author, illustrator, and former Children's Laureate, Lauren Child CBE, to curate a programme of live and digital events.

Artist Sir Quentin Blake gifted 24 large-scale drawings to the Foundling Museum, which formed two emotive series, Children and Dogs, and Children, Birds & Dogs, the latter made especially for the museum and never seen before, and convey the internal emotional landscape of childhood.

The exhibition also reversed Blake’s iconic process of illustration, by setting words to his images. Long-time collaborator Michael Rosen and writers Opefoluwa Sarah Adegbite, Jackie Kay, Yomi Sode, 4 BROWN GIRLS WHO WRITE (Roshni Goyate, Sharan Hunjan, Sunnah Khan and Sheena Patel) and Ben Westwood, created poems in response to the drawings, which took you on an imaginative journey into a wide range of feelings and experiences of childhood.

In this film, Lauren explores the ideas that influence her choices as curator. I had many conversations with Lauren about her ideas around the importance of creative work for children which captures their voice, how our early experiences and exposure to art shape us as adults, where ideas come from, both large and small, and how creativity inspires more creativity. The resulting film sat alongside the exhibition, and is an exploration of these themes explored via interview and visual collage.

The exhibition ran at the Foundling Museum from July - September 2021.