No blood spilt as Brit Art star gives class a hands-on lesson

"Apparently he made a head out of his own blood," whispered Jessica Monaghan, aged 11, her eyes widening not with horror but with glee.

"Cool" replied her classmate Ellie Gash, looking around the airy Shoreditch studio of Marc Quinn, the sculptor best known for his 1991 work "Self" which was indeed made from nine pints of the artist's own blood before famously defrosting in Charles Saatchi's freezer.

Children are notorious for their preoccupation with bodily functions – grist to the mill for an artist such as Quinn who counts among his more notorious works a frozen cast of his baby son's head made from liquidised placenta.

Ellie and Jessica were part of a group of 11 pupils from Hugh Myddleton School in Islington, north London, who have joined Quinn for the launch of Big Arts Week, a charitable initiative set up to encourage professional artists to work with local schools to try to stop the arts being squeezed out of the curriculum.

Quinn, a contemporary of Damien Hirst and a leading Young British Artist, launched this summer's scheme by exploring his ideas on self portraiture yesterday with the primary school class – helping them to make plaster casts of their hands. None of the class had met a professional artist before let alone had a lesson in a studio whose walls were hung with works in progress – photo-paintings of flowers and "sculptures" of the human body made out of joints of meat. The children enthusiastically rolled up their sleeves before plunging their hands into blue gel normally used by dentists for making moulds of teeth then watched excitedly as the plaster was poured into their unique mould.

It was the second time Quinn has been involved in Big Arts Week, which will send 1,500 artists to work with 2,200 schools between 30 June and 4 July. Artists from every creative discipline have volunteered to take part including Harry Enfield, Anthony Gormley and Anish Kapoor.

"I just think that children are really completely open to new ideas," said Quinn. "So it's a great time to get children interested in art and to make them think about things differently. A visit to a studio can make them realise that it is possible to be an artist and that you don't have to get a job and never do anything creative again. It opens their minds to ideas and just lets them be themselves."

Casting children's hands was the easiest way to introduce them to sculpture and to enable them to create a unique self-portrait, he added.

"It's something that they would not have done before," he said. "It's also very direct and fun to do. Just by changing the post of your hand you are doing to put a completely different meaning into the sculpture. It is all about you. The bit that is art is not what you necessarily think. It's very individual. Each one of those hands is going to be different. It is not just like showing children a painting and making them copy it.?

Emma Parr, 11, who was planning to use her finished cast to keep things in, agrees. "Usually we just do painting. This is good, making real models."

Molly Crawford, 11, who posed with her fingers crossed for good luck, said: "When we go to a gallery with the school it's like there's the art now let's draw it ourselves. This is different because the artist is actually here so you can ask him about it.

But asked whether she might one day want to pursue a career as an artist she confides: "I think it's a bit of risky job. I like art but I think I'd rather be a lawyer."

Ellie Gash, who posed her hand "like a scary ghost" was surprised to be told by Quinn that a photograph she spotted on the studio wall that looked like a face was actually a human torso sliced through the middle. "To me it still looks like a face," she said thoughtfully. "But I suppose art is many different things compared to what the artist thinks they are."

To take part in Big Arts Week e-mail info@bigartsweek.com or see www.bigartsweek.com