During the summer of 2015 I took a group of Year 9 students from The Oldham Academy North (TOAN) to Helmshore Textile Mill Museum where they learnt about cotton spinning, made drawings and took photographs of the machinery and objects used in the process. Back in the classroom they worked on collages and then on computer to create new colourful abstract artworks for the outside of the Cans. The Cans feature in a new play park at Elk Mill as an artwork that celebrates the sites history of the last mule spinning cotton mill to be built in Oldham. The work embodied the notion of 'carrying the can' - meaning 'take responsibility for the overall' - as pupils created individual artwork but also shared it and worked together so that the individual Can designs would look like a collection.  This is one of five artworks I created at Elk Mill for British Land.