Installation Design for Ellen Renton‘s Freedom: A Living Poem, which was presented as part of the Edinburgh International Children’s Festival Family Day at the National Museum of Scotland in May 2025, and reworked for North Edinburgh Arts that July.

What does the word freedom mean? Is it a tall tree in the wind or a shiny disco ball?

The project grew from workshops with Spartans Community Group in North Edinburgh, as part of Imaginate’s Creative Encounters programme, which places children’s rights at the heart of the creation process. Ellen Renton worked with young people to write a poem exploring the idea of Freedom, and an audio/visual installation was created as a culmination of the process to allow an audience to choose to experience the poem in different sensory ways – one was intimate, dark, and more solitary; whereas the other was more open, bright and airy.

North Edinburgh Arts | photographs Jassy Earl

Edinburgh International Children’s Festival at the National Museum of Scotland | photographs Brian Hartley