Island of Us. Conversations about Justice with Children

Edited by Jack Young and Seth Pimlott.
Designed by Patrick Fisher of Frontwards Design.

Island of Us: conversations about justice with children is inspired by a week-long project with Chisenhale Primary School, at Chisenhale Gallery. Led by artist Jack Young, using the methodology of Philosophy for Children, each class carefully considered questions of justice and freedom, conjuring up imaginaries of how life would be organised on the ‘Island of Us’.

Island of Us is an invitation to think about the kind of world we live in and how it might be otherwise. Taking place across one week at the end of the summer term, over 300 pupils from Chisenhale Primary School took over Chisenhale Gallery in response to Rory Pilgrim’s exhibition pink and green. Drawing on the island location of the exhibition and its explorations of justice and freedom with men incarcerated at HMP Portland, students spent the week as artists, exploring the complicated issue of how we should treat people who might have hurt others. Through island-dreaming, fables, manifesto-making, and populating the island with people, places, plants, and buildings, the students used art to imagine the kind of world we want to live in. The book showcases their collaborative work and the discussions that took place. It also includes session plans, resources and inspiration for artists and educators to initiate related projects in the classroom or elsewhere.

Jack Young is a writer and socially-engaged artist living in Bristol. He makes hybrid work exploring land justice, subversive natural histories and hauntings of landscape and archive. His debut chapbook is URTH (Big White Shed, 2022), he co-edited the book Haunting Ashton Court: A Creative Handbook for Collective History-Making (2023), and his most recent pamphlet is in the country garden/the end of england (SPAM Press, 2023). He also co-hosts the literary podcast Tender Buttons in partnership with Storysmith Bookshop.  As an educator, he works with young people using arts-based critical pedagogy, applied theatre, and creative writing to explore themes ranging from creative approaches to reanimating the gaps and silences in historical archives, to queer ecologies and speculative fiction. He has worked with community spaces and cultural institutions in Barcelona, London, and Bristol, including MACBA, Institut Broggi, the Royal Academy, Horniman Museum, Tate, Gasworks, Spike Island, UWE Bristol, Acta Theatre, and Artspace Lifespace, among many others. You can find more about Jack’s work at jackmyoung.net.