Henderson Elementary

In Exploring As We Make, students experimented with materials like charcoal and pastels to see what happens when they change how they move, press, and layer marks. The focus was on noticing how their choices affect what shows up on the page, and how those changes can shift the feeling of a mark. The big question guiding this work was how can we make art that shows how we feel? Students were encouraged to pay attention to what was happening as they worked, noticing how movement, pressure, colour, and texture change the marks they make. 

They explored how different choices can lead to different results, even when doing something simple like a line or a scribble. They also noticed how materials can behave in different ways, and how marks can remind them of things, places, or feelings in personal ways.  Over time, students began to notice what they liked and make more intentional choices in their work. In the final weeks, they selected parts of their work and brought them together into a collaborative class piece. 

In my first AIRs program residency at Grandview Elementary, we explored and continue to explore our personal connection to the world, our stories, and our relationships. We considered our place in the bigger picture and how our ideas, thoughts, and perceptions shape our communities and society, and how we carry those things with us daily. This year, I’ve been thinking about how our inner worlds act as windows onto the bigger picture. The frame we look out of invites others to look in with their unique viewpoints. What we see and what they see can overlap or be obscured. We are all individuals with vibrant inner and outer lives that make up increasingly larger pictures. In this art installation, empty clay vessels represent ourselves. Just as who we are is built from our families, neighbourhoods, communities, and society. Each vessel carries an image that serves as an individual marker for each person and how who we are is based on our experiences and outside influences from your communities and society. Students collaborated on a large painting on canvas for each cohort while working on a personal painting with their individual marks. Pieces of the collaborative canvas were removed and filled in with each student’s individual paintings, with the individual marks either showing or obscured to show how every person contributes to the big picture, whether it’s immediately apparent or not. In a final act, students symbolically took parts of the communal painting and placed them in their vessels, just as we incorporate the people, places, and beliefs that surround us into our personal stories.  When we look at the bigger picture, all these parts become one. Students took small parts of the canvas to represent how we make up part of the larger world, and how the world makes up us. Each child slipped their inner self piece into their vessel; only those who witnessed the act know how it has informed them. As part of their art, students explored who they are through colour, movement, and shapes. They created self-portraits that went beyond a simple representation of their face and body. Students practiced resilience, problem-solving, and a sense of belonging. They mastered the materials and techniques they explored and made decisions and choices. Sharing their ideas about self and how self fits into the larger construction, the work created by students in Grandview was and is multifaceted and complex. When put together, the performance and finished facets beautifully symbolize what it is to be a part of the bigger picture.

Exploring photo slides, printed photographs, and 16mm film, students scratched, painted, and manipulated found images to ask questions, imagine new possibilities, and think how documentary photography and film actively reinterpret it.