The family workshop developed by Leap Then Look for the Royal Academy of Arts, London (August 28) was entitled Play, Assemble, Connect and took the theme of ‘learning to be an artist’.

Lucy Cran describes her studio practice as ‘making as a process of learning and discovery’, and the theme reflects Lucy Cran and Bill Leslie’s interest in sharing their artistic approaches with others. The event, which is presented as part of the Look Who’s Talking online exhibition, ran across four rooms, and it showed some strategies that can be used to encourage new ways of looking, making and thinking, without any predefined goals or expectations.

The short text panels, placed at the entrance to each room, provided a simply worded introduction to a proposed activity and offered families a few suggestions.

In revered cultural spaces, such as London’s Royal Academy of Arts, many visitors can feel constrained and passive consumers of information, but the Play, Assemble, Connect workshop offered productive alternatives to conventional modes of intellectual contemplation. Participants were given multiple opportunities for free exploration and play, permission to experience art and art processes – socially and collectively – in active and imaginative ways.  As ever, for Leap Then Look, the activities aimed to challenge the expectations of participants, and to open up a space where children and adults alike could be genuinely surprised by what they had created.