Nightingale Elementary

This residency introduced students to different forms of cameraless image-making through tactile and process-based art activities. Students explored how images can be created through touch, transfer, light, and transformation rather than through direct representation or cameras.

To begin, students created rubbings using graphite and soft pastels, discovering how paper can record textures and surfaces through pressure and contact. They experimented with layering and abstraction while observing how different materials and textures appeared on paper.

Next, students explored monoprinting using paint and found shapes. Through pressing, transferring, and pulling “ghost prints,” students observed how images could shift and change through repetition and material interaction.

Students were then introduced to cyanotype, an early photographic process that uses UV light to create images without a camera. Using leaves, flowers, and found materials, they created sun prints and observed how shadows and light could leave traces on paper. As the prints developed in water, students began noticing faces, creatures, and shapes emerging from the abstract forms.

In the final sessions, students transformed their collected works into collaged characters and creatures. By cutting and assembling elements from their previous artworks, they explored imagination, storytelling, and interpretation. These characters later became simple paper puppets, allowing students to animate and bring movement to the forms they had created.

Throughout the residency, students were encouraged to slow down, observe closely, experiment with materials, and discover that images can emerge through process, sensation, and play.

Over twelve weeks in the art and discovery room at Florence Nightingale Elementary, the ordinary, overlooked, and easily torn transformed into something strong. In the hands of students, paper was softened, twisted, lengthened, joined, woven. It became a record of touch and a way of knowing.

Students learned to spin paper into yarn, discovering through repetition the quiet transformations that happen when material meets attention. At first, the paper resisted. It broke, refused to behave. But as students returned to it—rolling it along their palms, dampening it with water, learning to use a drop spindle and coaxing it into thread—they began to understand its hidden softness. They learned that paper has memory. That it responds to patience.

Students twisted their strands together, curious about the way a small piece could become part of something long enough to stretch across a hallway. They measured their yarn against the familiar landmarks of their school: the hallways, stairs, classroom. The yarn became a playful instrument for mapping space, for asking questions, for imagining scale differently.

Weaving brought its own revelations. Some students hesitated to let their yarn disappear into the collective work, wanting to protect the piece that carried their effort. But when the finished weaving was unrolled, they searched for their contributions with pride, recognizing the subtle twists, material and colour combinations that marked their own hands. The collective did not erase them; it amplified them.

The works in this exhibition are made of paper, but they are also made of repetition, courage, and the willingness to contribute to something larger than oneself. They hold the imprint of many hands. They carry the quiet evidence of transformation—of material, of process, of the students themselves. I invite you to listen to student reflection as you contemplate their collaborative woven work.

Art against waste examined the ubiquity of plastics in our throw away and convenience culture, it’s relation to the oil industry and the mounting global impacts from plastic waste on health, biodiversity and climate change. Students are anxious growing up in an environmental catastrophe that is not of their making. Although we throw plastic away or even ‘recycle’ it, plastic never actually goes away. This project was about changing our relationship to garbage, from one of disposal to one of care and responsibility, repurposing it into works of art that can raise lasting awareness about the problem of unnecessary plastic production. Three classes of intermediate students brought garbage from their homes to the studio, where we washed, deconstructed and sorted them into raw materials for artmaking. Students sketched their ideas and using recycled cardboard as a base and the raw plastic materials they had repurposed, created marine animals, shorebirds,

zooplankton and collaged works. It was overwhelming working with and being immersed in so much garbage.

“It was challenging to make something out of garbage. Plastic doesn’t stick well, and it is tricky to work with. It is just made for one thing – to sell a product.” Student quote 

These beautiful and unsettling art objects were installed in the school to create an underwater ‘Sea of Plastic” and an Artivist gallery communicating an urgent message. 

STOP the production of NON-ESSENTIAL plastics.” Student quote 

Students from all the classes in the school were able to tour the exhibition and learn about the impact of plastic waste. The student artists felt empowered to be able to create works that not only changed their relationship to plastic waste, they could enable their school peers to see and understand the problem more deeply, and inspire action.