At Garden Studios, one of our primary goals is to build relationships with our Park Royal neighbours in the community we call home.
The Masbro Youth Club offers a safe and friendly West London environment four nights a week for young people aged 13-19 (up to 25 for young people with disabilities) to engage in a variety of informal and formal activities and workshops. These activities include art and crafts, healthy cooking, individual and group work sessions, a weekly girls and young women evening, gym and fitness sessions, dance classes, and a football coaching with Chelsea Kickz.
Masbro Youth Club recently undertook a collaborative creative project titled ‘The Epic Megatron.’ A location-based art installation with some pieces featured on the Garden Studios campus, it drew inspiration from machinery and factories as well as everyday objects and nature. Local artist Hanna Benihoud, who makes public art that tells a community’s story, using empathy to engage and action to create,’ was the artist-in-residence leading the project.
Initially, the young people went through a stage of ‘sensory exploration’ which involved wearing blindfolds to heighten the other senses and having the participants feel their way through a series of materials and objects. They were then asked to design and draw some of their dream factories and machinery. Out of that session came several ideas ranging from a machine that turns mushrooms into bikes, vegetables into gold, a theme park powered by doughnuts, a Brussel sprout factory that turns sprouts into ice cream, a ‘No More Work Factory’ that turns work into fizzy drinks, sweets and iPads, ‘The Epic Factory’ and ‘The Megatron’. The inspiration for the name is an amalgamation of the final two factories resulting in ‘The Epic Megatron’.
Finally, the young people from Masbro Youth Club made a physical model of their factories using a range of mixed media. Then Hanna Benihoud created a digital mock-up of ‘The Epic Megatron.’ Thus, the final factory was complete, celebrating Park Royal’s infantry in form, colour, playfulness, silliness, kindness and of course a rejection of Brussel sprouts.
