Toby Paterson Commission for Hallfield Junior School
Visions of a Primary City
2003
Artist Toby Paterson was commissioned to create a new permanent work for Hallfield Primary School. Toby Paterson’s wall paintings use the device of a large-scale abstract painting, painted directly onto the wall, to provide a ‘landscape’ upon which to position various other elements. In the past these have included relief sculptures, paintings on wood panels or Perspex, Perspex sculptures, photographs and more complex images painted directly onto the wall.
For his commission, Paterson produced a large-scale wall-painting of a ‘rhetorical cityscape’ in the stairwell of the school. The work reflects the development of the built environment. As such there is an attempt to create areas of visual harmony and conflicting areas of compositional discord by carefully selecting and incorporating individual elements within the work. In this specific work, these elements are drawn from a variety of sources, including the local architecture of the school and surrounding community.
Artist Anna Boggon, and architectural designers Greg Epps and Samson Adjei, were artists and architects-in-residence at Hallfield Junior School, where they worked with 155 children in Years 4 and 5 to make a utopian city. The pupils responded to ideas of art and architecture, with reference to Denis Lasdun and Berthold Lubetkin, through workshops and visits to the Gallery, London Zoo and the National Theatre.
The commission and cityscape were opened by the Lord Mayor of Westminster and David Fitzgerald, Head of Art Education at the Department for Culture Media and Sport, during Architecture Week in 2003.
Supported by
![bbg-[Converted]100.jpg](http://www.serpentinegallery.org/bbg-%5BConverted%5D100.jpg){kind=small}
Toby Paterson Commission 2003
Project Launch at Hallfield Junior School 2003
© 2003 Toby Paterson
