Online Creative Workshop: Practice Play with Meera Shakti Osborne
Meera Shakti Osborne led an exciting creative workshop exploring transformative possibilities through playing.
For Notes on Play, Osborne led an online creative workshop for young people aged 18-25, which explored transformative possibilities through playing. The workshop was discussion-based, with elements of drawing and audio recording. The artist encouraged 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 made a clapping game derived from the session, and inspired by recordings from the ‘Playtimes’ collection, in the British Library Sound Archives. The artist also created a resource pack that you can access above by clicking ‘download pack’.
The workshop welcomed young people aged 18-25 from diverse communities and backgrounds. Participants from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds were particularly encouraged to join.
Biography
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. Osborne is interested in art as a tool to create historical documents that represent feelings and the in-between stuff that often gets left out of history-making.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.