Busy Betsy: More Gormley, MAG and Urbis

We've just had the first two days of the school holidays and they have been thoroughly enjoyable, as usual I can just see the Easter break flying by.

Our culture trips started yesterday with a visit to the Manchester Art Gallery. The monkeys absolutely love this place. They were really impressed with Filter by Antony Gormley. This hanging figure is made of flat steel rings welded together and is just magical. There are some wonderful photographs on Flickr of the installation of the work. The monkeys were quite surprised when I told them that the same man had designed the works on Crosby beach. Mr Gormley, my little ones are in awe of you!

We took part in the family activity "Attack of the monster plants". On arrival we got paper, pencils and a viewer to take to Paul Morrison's fabulous 25m black and white mural of giant sunflowers and daisies with a cottage and some ruins on the second floor. We drew 4 sections of this work, boy monkey really got into this. Then we went to the Atrium where we drew a still life of real plants. Armed with these designs we then went to the printing stations where we made mono prints based on our drawings in either black or white.

We stayed in the museum for the rest of the day, carrying around a tea pot bag and a fish one; trying to find the objects that inspired the bags, exploring the contents of the bags and making more drawings. Eventually they wanted to visit the Clore Gallery, I think if they could have stayed overnight they would have.

Today we planned to go to Urbis to attend the family friendly LoVid performance. I am not often disappointed but I think I completely missed the point today. My friend had come over from Chester and we had high expectations of the audio video performance that merged craft, electronic art and conversation; and contributing to a collaborative weaving sculpture. Sadly as it was, it took place in a very small corner of the exhibition space that did not really invite, I didn't think the noise was family friendly, hardly any explanation was given and the reception was far from 'friendly'.

Now, you will all know that I would be first in line to say that children, however young, should be introduced to a wide variety of art but somehow I didn't think that a lot of the works were suitable for young viewing. I really loved the back of this work but wouldn't have liked to explain the front of it. Luckily the monkeys didn't get to study it as they were too distracted by their mum getting them out of a video room that showed unsuitable images and languages for their age group!