What do children have to say about climate change? This collaborative poster series investigates

My Pockets is a Yorkshire-based production company and arts organisation run by Sally and Peter Snelling. The creative studio predominantly focuses their time on briefs in the charity and education sector, working with young people to realise film, art, animation and music projects that relate directly to communities that have experiences of the subjects they explore. The aim is always “to make things that are honest, funny and heartfelt”, Peter shares and their recent project with the Youth Voice and Influence Service in Sheffield was no exception to their rule.

Peter and Sally were originally tasked with making a short documentary on the subject of climate change with school children in Sheffield, but the pair were keen to take a slightly different approach. “We’ve made projects before about climate change and it’s hard to move it on from being all about saving the bees. We’ve got nothing against bees, but also thought it would be powerful to make a project where we could have lots of different perspectives, ideas and experiences,” Peter says.

The organisation started out by facilitating workshops in youth clubs across Sheffield, opening conversations on the climate with over 70 young people, from which they gathered a core group of around 20 students from different schools to be involved in a more hands-on exploration of the problem they were tackling through printmaking. “We thought if this project was about making a collection of prints, we could have a variety of voices all united by one single medium,” shares Peter.

To channel the children’s hopes and fears about climate change onto the page Sally, Peter and the team set them a task to draw and develop a printed poster that they would then expose onto screens at Juice Studios near their base in Hull. “We then returned to the groups with their screens and printed in sessions that were really busy, messy, fun and a bit chaotic. It was fantastic,” Peter says. “The physical nature of the project was inspiring and fun for everyone and also contained within it a kind of message. If we are going to change the direction of our climate we are going to have to do it for real too — in the real world, by doing real stuff.”

Stark and sombre some of the students printed messages are a cry for help: ‘Pause the world’ and ‘Please don’t walk away and forget about this’, but others are especially brave and some even tongue-in-cheek: ‘I’m more scared of my mum that I am of climate change’ and ‘But I love the sound of petrol engines’. With little interference into their final messages, the organisation wanted young people to express exactly what they needed to on the topic — no filter. “We wanted them to be honest about it, to be hopeful, annoyed or make fun of it and stick two fingers up at the forces behind it,” Peter concludes. “We want people to see the prints and feel a bit less paralysed by fear, a bit more mischievous and a bit more hopeful that there are lots of people who want things to get better.”