Good Things Happen, West Barns Studios, March 10th 2025
Trees, Bees, Bumble Bees, moving image, 1 minute, 23 seconds, shown at “Good Things Happen” an exhibition at West Barns Studios, March 2025
“Good Things Happen” is an exhibition celebrating the artwork made by West Barns
Primary School pupils. Trees, Seas and Bumble Bees is a work made for
and shown through this group exhibition in West Barns Studios during March
2025 by Milly Toplis. This was an exhibition amongst fellow artists: Inayah Hussain, Bess Schofield, Haoyue Xu, Florence Kroll, Hannah Gavilla Latin and Nina Ji.
Responding to a day spent teaching at West Barns Primary with Primary 5 and 6
children, “Good things Happen” was curated based on their artwork. This exhibition was held at West Barns Studio on March 10th 2025. The students also visited the Talbot Rice Gallery and participated in a card flower making workshop.
This project was funded by the Gordon Cook Foundation. This project would not
have been able to be a well facilitated without this generous support from the
foundation, so it is with great thanks to them that this project has taken place.
The artists spent a day with West barns Primary School making art with a class of P5/6 students. Each student was given a screen to create a silk painting with, creating beautiful windows of colourful scenes based on the forest. The work created in“Good Things Happen” was inspired by the pupil’s artwork this day.
Trees, Seas and Bumble Bees was an animation of the students’ haikus in their handwriting along with images of their silk paintings. The students were very excited to see their work appearing on the screen.
Alongside fellow exhibiting artist Bess Schofield, goodie bags were made for students to take home to learn how to print, encouraging them to further their artistic journey and continue it outside of this day. Milly designed the zine explaining how to drypoint print at home as well as helping assemble the bags.