Bruce Elementary

In a transitory hall space, students shuffle between open-concept classrooms and the library, making their ways to and fro. They skip to avoid being told not to run in the halls; they jump, hold hands, wave their arms, and move through space with gestures that feel earnest and instinctive to them.

"Gesture" originates from the early 15th-century Medieval Latin gestūra ("mode of action, bearing"), derived from the Latin gestus, the past participle of gerere, meaning "to bear, carry, or conduct oneself". Children often exist within institutions where high expectations on how one must conduct themselves is projected onto them. The gestural moments witnessed within the transitory hallway space felt urgent, a landing point in a desire to preserve the privilege of childhood, and facilitating the space for them to engage with art making without emphasizing the preconceived ideas of aesthetics adults often hold onto their work. By offering arts based experiences through material engagement, this work aims to encourage participation and process over the final product. 

Mode of Action began with a fabric filled environment where students were offered the opportunity to explore movement. Making fabric move with breath, or moving bodies create scenes, they worked collaboratively to navigate the space with intention. Students explored paint on both paper and canvas, painting at a distance with extended paint brushes. This engagement with paint aimed to deconstruct preconceived ideas of paint as being used only for representational creation. Highlighting abstraction aimed to advocate for students’ own creative ideas and those of others. Next, students used oil pastels on their painted sheets to follow a button around the page, allowing the lines to move erratically and excitedly. Students exchanged papers and lines were followed with scissors, creating organic unique shapes. These moments of excitement translated into the culmination of their work in a collaborative installation. Students transformed the space using accumulated materials and ideas, exploring light, fabric, painted paper shapes, and stacked objects. 

This process emphasized teamwork, adaptability, and spatial awareness, highlighting art as a collective and experiential practice rather than an individual product.

Emotion Cartography is an ongoing practice that explores the relationships between emotions, bodies, memory, and place. Through drawing, mapping, texture collection, and observation, students were invited to think about how feelings can shape the way we experience and move through the world around us.

Over the course of this six-week AIRS residency at Bruce Graham Elementary, students explored contour lines inspired by forms found in nature and everyday life, connecting shapes together into shared landscapes and experimenting with rubbings to create imagined topographies. We gathered textures from tree bark, sidewalks, classroom objects, and, during unexpected rainy indoor days, even the bottoms of shoes. What began as simple marks and observations slowly became emotional terrains, maps of memory, and collaborative worlds.

A big part of the residency was making space for experimentation. Rather than focusing on perfect outcomes, students were encouraged to follow textures, feelings, questions, and associations as they emerged. Many activities became opportunities to talk about connection, between people, places, bodies, environments, and the stories we carry with us.

Being part of AIRS has felt really humbling. It’s meaningful to work alongside artists, teachers, and school communities who are all trying, in different ways, to support young people and create conditions for flourishing. The residency has continued to shape my own practice and reminded me how much creativity can come from flexibility, play, and shared attention, especially during unexpected moments.

This residency invited students to explore their relationship with nature, starting by observing and photographing fractal patterns found in the natural world. From there, the project shifted toward the shoreline as a space for reflecting on in-between places and the “gray areas” of life. Shorelines are constantly changing landscapes where land and water meet, making them a powerful metaphor for transformation, transition, and the ways humans are also continually evolving.

Throughout the residency, students experimented with natural materials such as handmade inks, leaves, sand, and water, alongside concepts and mediums including fractal patterns, poetry, personal memories of visits to the shoreline, photography, and video feedback techniques. Students created leaf prints and detailed observational drawings of natural specimens collected along the shoreline, using close observation to better understand the textures, patterns, and forms found in nature. They also wrote poems inspired by memories of visiting the beach or shoreline, as well as personal experiences of connection with the natural world.

Students then integrated their writing into shoreline ink paintings using a variety of techniques, including cutting out letters, stamping, and using typewriters—sometimes for the first time. These processes encouraged curiosity, experimentation, and play while emphasizing the beauty of unpredictability, change, and releasing total control within the creative process. Students moved fluidly between observing, reflecting, and making, discovering new ways to respond to both the physical landscape of the shoreline and the imagined emotional and conceptual spaces it represents.

On Inner Sacredness is a six-week artist book residency developed with Grade 6 and 7 students at Bruce Elementary School. The project invites students to reflect on the quiet, enduring parts of themselves that hold resilience, wisdom, and care. Through acts of witnessing, nourishing, forgiving, and trusting inner guidance, students explored how inner experiences can be translated into visual and tactile forms.

Working within the medium of the artist book, students engaged with collage, blackout poetry, cyanotype, map-making, curation, bookbinding, and plant-based material explorations. Learning from Musqueam Indigenous harvesting and gifting practices, students put into actions acts of reciprocity, care, and attentiveness to the natural world throughout the making process. Plants became both material and metaphor — beings that hold space for wisdom, grounding, and self-discovery.

Through orienting themselves with found images, texts, natural materials, and intuitive mark-making, students created visual maps of memory, feeling, and personal values. Processes such as collage and blackout poetry encouraged students to uncover hidden meanings and trace connections between external materials and their internal worlds, helping them identify and trust their own inner compass.

The resulting works embrace imperfection, self-empathy, and the ongoing process of healing. In the final stage of the residency, students gathered these explorations into hand-bound artist books that serve as intimate archives of their journeys and reminders of the inner strength and wisdom they can return to in moments of uncertainty.