Which Way Now?

Part of Changing Play

Jun 2018 – ongoing Free

Artist Sam Curtis has been working with children and early years workers from the Portman Early Childhood Centre, North Westminster since June 2018.

Inviting children to lead a series of walks through the neighbourhood, the project addresses a number of questions: What do child-led walks tell us about children’s experience of the city and their relationship to it? How does managed risk open up children’s experience of the world? Can we learn to re-think the city by listening to children as they navigate the local area?

Changing Play is an ongoing partnership with the Portman Early Childhood Centre in Westminster, which brings together artists, children, families and educators to critically reconsider early years education and care.

Sam Curtis

Sam Curtis is an artist and curator based in London. Collaborating with a range of people from diverse areas of work and life, he develops projects that provoke, question or subvert our ideas around creativity, economy and labour.

Building relationships and trust are key to the conversations he fosters; from which unexpected collaborations grow. For over 10 years he has used his day jobs as platforms or starting points from which to develop practice and projects. This has been a useful way to navigate precarity and has become a vehicle for inhabiting the grey areas and permeable boundaries between art and life. Informed by two years working as a fishmonger in Harrods, he now runs the Centre for Innovative and Radical Fishmongery, an organisation that explores how fishmongery intersects with art, individuals and society. During a six-year period working in education as an outreach tutor within the homeless sector, he co-founded and facilitated Seymour Art Collective (2009-on-going), a group of artists who have experienced homelessness. He currently work as a curator at the Bethlem Gallery situated within the Bethlem Royal Hospital, the gallery supports artists with lived experience of mental illness. Sam graduated from Goldsmiths MFA programme in 2008 and has exhibited across the UK, Europe and the USA. His work is represented by Division of Labour.

The Portman Early Childhood Centre

The Portman Early Childhood Centre provides education, care and family support services for young children and their families living in the Church Street area of Westminster, North London. These include a nursery school, adult education classes, family support, employment services, parenting groups and workshops.