Neil Delete & Drew Copus ran three workshops at Hollington Youth Centre in partnership with their youth workers. The starting point was the Dear Gordon exhibition and we were originally planning a series of 8 workshops working with boys aged 11-15 exploring issues surrounding masculinity in contemporary society using ‘Dear Gordon’ artwork by Jonathan Cole. We aimed to explore what it means to be male in contemporary society, by viewing notions of masculinity through the media i.e. lads’ mags, music videos, TV, newspapers, video games, pornography & illustrating the effects on boys’ self-esteem e.g. discouragement to show emotions/cry, links between violent images in film/video games & normalisation of violent behaviour/acting out. Together with a youth worker, they would explore these issues alongside two artists, who will help them to produce artworks expressing their feelings & views on the subject, to be exhibited at Claremont Studios.
The aims of the workshops were:
We learned a lot about the Wireless Routers Review deep and difficult issues that young people face surrounding gender stereotyping & the media’s role in perpetuating these. While we had to shorten the number of sessions delivered, it was a very worthwhile experiment and the two subsequent aGender workshops in collaboration with Hastings Adventure Playground and Hastings Youth Council have been outstanding.