Let’s look at my family

Studio Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, London

Let's look at my family

Visiting the Family Faces exhibition is a bit like going to a school art room on parents' evening. All the best work is on show, in this case sculpture, with all their quirkiness and lopsided pride.

But this is no schoolroom. The 60 families who took part in Family Faces, a project to get parents more involved in their children's education, have their art placed side by side with some of the National Portrait Gallery's (NPG) best-known paintings.

Family Faces has to be appreciated as a process as well as a final show. The full production involved the gallery, the London Borough of Haringey's Parental Involvement Programme, seven schools in the borough and a ceramic artist.

Haringey is one of the poorest boroughs in the capital. At one of the participating schools, South Harringay Infants, 60 per cent of the children come from families who are housed temporarily in the borough.

Over 40 per cent of the children are from refugee and asylum-seeking communities, and 20 per cent of those are newly arrived. The issues of a sense of belonging, identity, language and attainment are huge ones for teachers to cope with.

According to Veena Sharma, the borough's parental involvement coordinator, Haringey education services believes that a child's attainment is improved by parents' or carers' interest. Sharma has worked with the NPG on a number of smaller projects and has forged partnerships with other London museums.

The first stage of the project was to get families into the gallery. Sharma says many of the families had never visited a museum or gallery before Matt Sheratt, a Royal College of Art-trained ceramicist and artist in residence at the NPG, introduced the participants to family portraits that hang in the gallery.

The focus was the Shudi Family Group portrait of an 18th-
century Prussian harpsichord maker, his family and their cat. The families sat in the gallery and sketched the artworks. Back at the schools, Sheratt provided workshops for six months for the families in the design and use of the clay.

This painting, along with others from the NPG's collection, introduces the exhibition. Others include Five Children of King Charles I with family pet (1637), Ramsay MacDonald and family (1930s), and Charles Dickens and family (1865). They have been brought down from the main gallery into the Studio Gallery and look a bit grand, and possibly daunting, in this smaller space.

The main wall of the Studio Gallery is an eye-catching display, a procession of shining ceramics sitting on broad, deep shelves encased by glass and mirrored from behind. The children's interpretations of their own family life are fun and sometimes speak volumes about their lives.

Family dinners, birthday parties and sofa-sitting feature strongly among the themes. The panels next to the pieces have the answers to questions asked of the artists: What is your sculpture about? Where did your ideas come from? How pleased were you with your sculpture? What was your favourite bit of the project?

Many of the works are glazed, but my favourite was a plain clay piece called PlayStation. A mother-and-son team, Michele and Cameron Haigh, sit on their sofa playing together. The shoelaces, hair and the expressions on their faces are all well defined.

Amusingly, the more detailed work - like Us and the Sea by Maria and Fabio Magalheas - shows abundant promise in terms of the parent getting carried away by the task. Indeed, one mother says: 'It showed me that if you put your mind to something you can achieve whatever you want in life.'

Another piece, Overcrowded, has three heads on top of one another, with a cat underneath them all. It shows the stress caused to a family waiting to be re-housed.

It's a shame that Family Faces is in the basement, where it will lose potential new audiences and possibly be missed by NPG regulars. To remedy the situation, the gallery has a large banner in the foyer directing the way to the studio. And the final panels of the Family Faces exhibition invite participation in the rest of the gallery and a challenge to find other family portraits.

It is what lies behind the sculptures themselves that is most important. Their benefits have been felt at more important levels. 'These are soft targets that you can't measure, like self-esteem, confidence of parents and children. They have tapped into skills that they thought they didn't have,' says Sharma.