Erika Cann | Llyr Davies | Sam Machell

Amelia | Audrey | Ava | Christina | Dylan | Ellie | Freya | Georgia | Hollie | Isaac | Izaak | Lily | Louis | Lucas | Luna | Mhairi | Olivia | Olivia | Phoebe | Ronnie | Rosie | Stanley | Teddy | Thea | Thomas | Tilly

100 Languages brings together artworks developed through Harbour House’s children and young people’s engagement programme, alongside work by the artists who collaborated with them. At the centre of the exhibition is a simple idea: children are not merely participants in cultural life, but imaginative collaborators with their own ways of making, thinking and understanding the world.

The exhibition takes its title from educator Loris Malaguzzi’s idea of the ‘hundred languages of children’. Malaguzzi argued that children communicate and learn in many different ways, not only through words, but through drawing, movement, play, making, sound and experimentation. 100 Languages explores what becomes possible when we create space for these different forms of expression, giving local children the freedom to communicate, create and explore in ways that feel meaningful to them.

The artworks featured in the exhibition emerged over a series of workshops held at Kingsbridge Community Primary School over the school term and Harbour House over the school holidays. Children made murals and cyanotypes, worked with clay, drew comics, built obstacle courses and invented islands and other worlds. 

Working with South West based artists including Erika Cann, Llyr Davies and Sam Machell, the children helped shape each project as it unfolded. This open-ended way of working gives children space to follow their own ideas without the pressure of getting something ‘right’. The artists’ work is shown alongside the children’s projects, revealing connections between their individual practices and their approaches to working with communities. These relationships move in both directions: artists bring their own interests, skills and ways of working into the room, while the children’s ideas, responses and experiments also challenge and influence the artists’ thinking and practice.

As psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott wrote: ‘It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative.’ 100 Languages resists the idea of childhood as a period of waiting to become something else. Children are cultural citizens now. They produce meaning, share knowledge, notice things adults overlook, and imagine how the world might be different.

Visitors are invited to take part in a free collage creative activity in the gallery space, and display their work as part of the exhibition.

The Neon Reef, 2025 
Co-Create Club Participants: Amelia, Audrey, Ava, Dylan, Ellie, Freya, Georgia, Lucas, Luna, Olivia, Phoebe, Ronnie, Rosie, Stanley, Teddy

The Neon Reef is a collaborative installation created by the 2025 Co-Create Club, an after school art club for year 5 children at Kingsbridge Community Primary School in partnership with artist Erika Cann. Developed over 12 weeks, the immersive work combines large-scale collaborative cyanotype prints on fabric with painted clay sculptures, inviting visitors to move through shifting ‘waves’ of material to discover imagined deep-sea worlds and creatures hidden within. 

Drawing inspiration from coral reefs, underwater ecosystems and speculative futures, the young people explored ideas of adaptation, environmental change and our connection to the natural world. Working across a range of experimental processes, they created surreal hybrid creatures shaped by their imagined environments, using making as a way to develop stories, collaborate and build new worlds together. Their work also considers the meeting point between natural and man-made materials, reflecting on how bodies and environments might adapt and transform in response to a changing world.

Developed from the children’s own words and ideas, The Neon Reef imagines an underwater environment that is ‘beautiful, mysterious and deep’, a protected space where humans might reconsider their relationship to the natural world and the futures they are helping to shape.

‘It was inspiring to see the young people approach each process with an openness and curiosity that allowed for new ways of working with materials and techniques. It challenged me to think about the ways I work with materials and their relationship to one another in a more playful way. It’s always really insightful to hear new perspectives and voices in response to your practice.’

Erika Cann

Banana Island, 2026 
Move and Make Holiday Club Participants: Christina, Esme, Thomas, Tilly

Working with artist Sam Machell during Harbour House’s Move and Make holiday programme - a week-long club with free lunches and snacks delivered in partnership with Kingsbridge Food Bank and Kingsbridge Community Primary School, children collaborated to create an imaginative world of cartoon characters, invented landscapes, obstacle courses, comics, costumes, and large-scale sculptural environments. 

Over the course of Easter 2026, participants developed their own characters through drawing, storytelling, sound, movement and play, gradually bringing a shared island world—‘Banana Island’—to life. Inhabited by fantastical creatures and imaginative inventions, the island grew through collaborative making and storytelling. The project encouraged children to build narratives and playful systems together, while creating opportunities to develop confidence, friendships and new creative skills.

Using cardboard, collage, drawing, performance, and movement, the young people explored how imagined worlds might be shaped by different bodies, personalities, and ways of experiencing the environment. The project foregrounded creativity as something social, playful, and embodied, creating space for children to collaborate, negotiate ideas, and collectively invent new possibilities together. 

‘Children follow ideas and the wild joy of creative momentum freely, egging each other on to further surreal worlds and stories. Working with the group was a reminder of all of this, as my lofty goals for the week were subsumed and I realised all I could do was surrender to the power of the banana.

The result was a world and network of artworks born from jokes and a cheeky sense of refusing authorial design; something I would do well to incorporate in my own process.’

Sam Machell

Life Along the Tide, 2026
Summer Term Co-Create Club Participants: Mhairi, Lily, Thea, Izaak, Isaac, Louis, Hollie, Olivia

Working with artist Llyr Davies, children from the Summer 2026 Co-Create Club created a collaborative mural for one of the school buildings, exploring how art could make the school environment feel more welcoming while connecting it to the wider Kingsbridge community. 

Taking the Kingsbridge Ria as their starting point, the group used collage, drawing and painting to develop individual panels inspired by the places, people and experiences that make the area meaningful to them. 

Each child was able to develop their own visual language, while the water became a shared thread running through the mural, connecting one contribution to the next. Bringing these individual perspectives together into a permanent artwork for the school, the project explored how a shared sense of place can be made from many different experiences and points of view.

‘It has been incredibly inspiring to work with the children at Kingsbridge Community Primary School. Supporting them to develop their ideas and helping to shape and develop the mural has given me the opportunity to learn new skills and approaches within my practice.

Most importantly, however, the children themselves have inspired me. Their creativity, imagination and enthusiasm have encouraged me to look at my own practice in new ways and have reminded me of the importance of creating work that is collaborative, meaningful and accessible. It has been a really valuable experience, and one that I will carry forward into a future practice.’

Llyr Davies