Maquinna Elementary

This project invited students to slow down and focus on a single, essential skill: working with scissors. Students practiced paper cutting as a way of learning through repetition, attention, and care.

Limiting the materials to blue paper created a quiet visual world where small details became more visible and meaningful. As students refined their scissor skills, they explored form, rhythm, positive and negative space, and composition. Inspired in part by the cut-out works of Henri Matisse and his idea of “drawing with scissors,” students explored cutting as both a practical skill and a creative process.

Students were encouraged to notice how the scissors move, how the paper responds, and how their hands become more precise through practice. Through cutting lines, curves, shapes, and spaces, they developed patience, confidence, and fine motor control.

Each week, pieces of cut paper were carefully archived to be used as collective material in subsequent sessions. In this way, students became aware of the attention and care behind each piece they worked with, often created and passed on by another peer.

At its heart, this project was about craftsmanship and the understanding that mastery grows gradually through repetition and attention. It also explored how working with a single material and tool can open up unexpected possibilities, and how careful making can transform a simple act into a thoughtful and creative process.

This residency was all about place. Place is the one thing a human being can never truly be without. So if we are unable to change, impact, or see ourselves reflected in the places around us, how do we begin to transform the places within ourselves so we can more clearly understand who we are and who we are meant to become?

Transforming an old locker room into a whimsical creative space became our entry point into exploring how place can shift, and how our relationships to it can shift too. Through reflective writing exercises, Division 1, 2, and 3 students were invited to imagine or create an inner place they could return to when feeling anxious, scared, sad, confused, angry, or grieving. Students were also encouraged to write about the tangible places in their lives that have shaped them. From poems about homelands thousands of miles away to memories just around the corner in Grandma’s kitchen, we learned how deeply place lives within us.

Division 1, 2, and 3 students then created collages inspired by the places in their poems. These collages were projected as they performed their writing, allowing imagination and the two-dimensional world of paper to become something immersive, embodied, and real.

In Divisions 4, 5, and 6, we created “poeTREEs” as another way of exploring place and connection. Each class collaboratively wrote a group poem, with every student contributing their own ending that wove in personal relationships to meaningful places. Together, we practiced editing, rewriting, and expanding our ideas. Just as our trees began to grow, so did we. Students constructed cardboard trees and used recycled materials to paper mâché their poeTREEs to life. Many students drew thoughtful connections between paper trees and real trees, opening conversations around recycling, regeneration, and the interconnectedness of all living things.