Category: Earth
Here's an innovative project that's caught my eye in recent weeks: artist Rebecca Davies plans to travel around the country in an Ice Cream Van, collecting English folk traditions and bringing them to East London where they will be re-enacted and re-appropriated by local people.
The launch event on Saturday 21st July in collaboration with Arts Admin at Hackney City Farm will feature an assortment of games and music and the main event, the London Scarecrow Championships, inspired by the rural tradition of scarecrow festivals. This is a chance for for people to make their very own straw person in the guise of London Villains and the lucky winner will have their portrait painted on to The Ice Cream Van.
It is free to participate so just turn up and get involved or to just come and cheer from the sidelines. The Ice Cream Van will provide the basics including straw, tights, broom stick and participants should bring wigs, masks and clothing to bring the scarecrow to life. There will also be an assortment of sideshows happening on the day including a Maypole, live music, snail races, apple bobbing and and the unveiling of The Ice Cream Van archive.
A bit more about The Ice Cream Van:
It will be a place of joy, public gathering, exchange and conversation: a project to celebrate our weird and wonderful histories by staging events that are right up your street… Cultural heritage in a cone! From cheese chasing to karaoke crooning, nettle eating to disco dancing, scarecrow stuffing to bingo calling The Ice Cream Van will breathe new life into old traditions and whip them up for all to share.
Over the summer Rebecca Davies will be collaborating with local groups to collect stories of East End traditions and heritage, to inform the designs that will cover the van. She is also working with choirs and bands to re-imagine traditional ice cream chimes with a unique London flavour.
Rebecca Davies is an illustrator and video maker who graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2010 where she specialised in moving image and sound. Her final show won the Sheila Robinson Prize for Drawing and she was nominated for the Helen Hamlyn Design Award. In 2011 Rebecca co-directed the creation of Studio at the Elephant – a unit in the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre acting as a studio for artists to work with the local community and providing a platform for locals to express themselves creatively. Studio at the Elephant celebrates local people and their cultural heritage.
This last illustration has nought to do with this current project but I rather liked it…