Online Creative Worksop: Practice Play with Meera Shakti Osborne

Meera Shakti Osborne will lead an online creative workshop for young people aged 18-25, which will explore transformative possibilities through playing. The workshop will be discussion-based, with elements of drawing and audio recording. Osborne will encourage participants to imagine and practise ways of feeling free, to think about how many versions of oneself can exist, and how play can cultivate hope and generate new forms of expression and identity.

After the workshop, Osborne will make a clapping game derived from the session, and inspired by recordings from the ‘Playtimes’ collection, in the British Library's sound archive.

We welcome young people aged 18-25 from diverse communities and backgrounds. We particularly encourage participants from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds.

Meera Shakti Osborne

Meera Shakti Osborne is an artist and community organiser from London. Osborne’s work focuses on collective healing through creative self-expression. They work primarily with young people, individuals on lower -income or who are unemployed, LGBTQ+ folk and BPOC. Meera is interested in art as a tool to create historical documents that represent feelings and the in-between stuff that often gets left out of history-making. They work in sound, oil paint, textile, breathing, talking and dancing.

Notes on Play

The creative workshop, ‘Practice Play with Meera Shakti Osborne’ is part of ‘Notes on Play’, an online exhibition. For ‘Notes on Play’, multi-disciplinary artist Shenece Oretha has been commissioned to make a new work in response to the ‘Playtimes’ collection within the British Library's sound archive. The project is part of the MA Curating Contemporary Art Programme Graduate Projects 2021, Royal College of Art, London, in partnership with British Library’s ‘Unlocking Our Sound Heritage’ (UOSH) project.

MA Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College of Art, London

Established over 25 years ago, the MA Curating Contemporary Art (CCA) programme at the Royal College of Art is recognised as an international leader in curatorial education and training and for its commitment to collaborative group project-based work that integrates theory and practice throughout the curriculum. The CCA programme approaches the field critically, theoretically and through best practice in commissioning, curating and programming with London-based and international arts organisations and spaces. These partnerships ensure that the knowledge and understanding of these practices is grounded in the context of public audiences, urbanisation and the digital.

The British Library

The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and one of the world's greatest research libraries. It provides world- class information services to the academic, business, research and scientific communities and offers unparalleled access to the world's largest and most comprehensive research collection. The Library's collection has developed over 250 years and exceeds 150 million separate items representing every age of written civilisation and includes books, journals, manuscripts, maps, stamps, music, patents, photographs, newspapers and sound recordings in all written and spoken languages. Over 10 million people visit the British Library website every year where they can view up to 4 million digitised collection items and over 40 million pages.

The British Library is also home to the nation’s sound archive, an extraordinary collection of over 6.5 million recordings of speech, music, wildlife and the environment. These recordings, from the UK and around the world, date from the birth of recorded sound in the 1880s to the present day. The sound archive forms a vital part of the nation’s collective memory and tells a rich story of the diverse history of the UK.

The session will be recorded for archival purposes and the recording will not be published to the public.

For more information, visit the Notes on Play project website and follow us on instagram(notes.on.play)!