This is Allowed Space is a free exhibition in our Clore Studio exploring inclusive, sensory and accessible approaches to art and learning. New work has been produced in collaboration with artists, pupils and teachers from Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) schools in Peckham and Camberwell.
Works created by pupils from Tuke School are shown alongside commissioned collaborative pieces by artists and students:
- Yolanda Shields aka Milktooth with Highshore School
- Jenny Pengilly with Cherry Garden School
- Billy Ash Sakula with Tuke School
This is Allowed Space aims to platform work by people whose voices are often underrepresented in gallery spaces. It recognises and values the creativity of young people with complex needs and provides them with an opportunity to explore and celebrate their own artistic practice.
This project has grown out of the Art Fund Teacher Fellowship, taking place between September 2025 and July 2026. During this time, Tuke School teacher Niall Deegan has been in residence within the SLG’s Communities and Learning team.
This work highlights the importance of the relationship between schools and galleries and how together we can create dynamic and powerful spaces for play and experimentation.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Yolanda Shields/Milktooth engages in intuitive colour journalling, constructing assemblage with fabrics and watercolours. Inspired by their Jamaican background, they merge folklore, dialect, and tradition to create a personal iconography. Inventing language to explore memories and record conditions of being their work is process led catharsis
Jenny Pengilly is a multi-disciplinary artist, facilitator and researcher based in London. Her practice predominantly focuses on the medium of the art workshop and utilises affective materials and DIY principles of making to facilitate play, experimentation, collaboration and mutual growth and exchange with children and adults. Jenny embraces sensory and multi-modal forms of engagement to explore new perspectives and embrace the weird. She is co-director of Joy For Stuff a creative social project and producer of monthly radio show Experimental Tunes and Children on RTM.fm.
Billy Ash Sakula is a Deptford based multi-disciplinary artist working in animation, illustration, movement and sensory experimentation. They make collaborative work that link different generations and communities; creating space for chaotic fertility and collective brilliance. Billy is interested in capturing instances of joy, flashes of excitement and glimpses of practical utopias; creating magical spaces in which social norms can be broken. They seek through their work to be an active practitioner of radical hope.