Year 8 Pilgrim creatively expresses his appreciation of the NHS
On the day when national rules changed (in January 2022) allowing Year 7 and 8 students to remove their masks in class, one creative Year 8 boy at The Pilgrims’ School, Alfie Leverton, chose to ‘install’ several hundred face masks in the school grounds as part of a project.
This was his answer to his project brief, ‘Cluttered Environment’. Essentially, he was inspired by Peter Walker’s installation: “The Leaves of the Trees: A Reflective Covid Memorial”, which he saw during a Harvest Service at Winchester Cathedral (October 2021). The metallic leaves in the installation were so fragile and beautiful and yet could absent-mindedly be mistaken for litter. He was also troubled by how many discarded face masks he observed cluttering up our environment, so he purchased several hundred face masks and wrote “THANK YOU NHS” on the front of them.
Head of Art at The Pilgrims’ School, John Walters, expressed, “I am incredibly proud of his concept and the speed with which he has developed it. He hopes to provoke us to ask whether our gratitude for the NHS is genuine and heartfelt or whether by discarding our used face masks all over our environment, we really are grateful.”
Alfie feels strongly that our gratitude for the NHS should move us to dispose of face masks in the correct manner; by using a bin. He is recycling masks used for this project by sharing them with his peers.
