Renfrew Elementary

This series presents a selection of artworks created by students at Renfrew Elementary School across six sessions exploring papermaking as an ecological, sensory, and collaborative practice, where discarded classroom paper was transformed through touch, experimentation, and embodied making into new artworks.

Each session created conditions for learning through tactile exploration, movement, and sensory attunement, where touch, smell, rhythm, texture, and gesture became ways of knowing. Students made botanical and scented papers infused with spices, dried flowers, and seeds, allowing memory, matter, and perception to interweave within the act of making. The process extended into explorations of chance and intention, as strands of yarn were embedded into wet pulp, forming a material dialogue in which shape and meaning emerged through shifting relations between hand, fibre, and pulp.Through painting with paper pulp, students explored geometry, repetition, symmetry, and rhythm as forms emerged through layering, gesture, and material interaction. In the final session, students worked with the idea of poetic paper, listening closely to Antonín Dvořák’s Humoresques, Op. 101, and Jóep Beving’s Little Waltz, attending to their shifting rhythms, pauses, and tonal movements as they selected words that resonated with them.

These words were then placed into their handmade sheets, where language, rhythm, and material met on the surface of the paper. Listening became a way of making, as meaning emerged through intuition, timing, and the unfolding relation between sound, word, and matter.

We invite the viewer to slow down and attune to each sheet of paper, to feel its embodied presence as it holds traces of touch, time, and transformation.

This year’s media art inquiry project at Renfrew Elementary School emerged from the illusory world of lenticular image-making. Together we experimented with scanimation and photography to create flickering printed images that don’t stay still — that change depending on how we see them. To warm up, we practiced storytelling, improvisation games, free writing and sketching. We dabbled in hand-making paper-based kinegrams and agamographs, finally culminating in our final project of photo-based lenticular images. We used our time in the AIRS studio to stretch our ability to hold complexity and contradiction and to stay curious about how creativity and cooperation can change the way we see the world. We worked to hold two images together without throwing one away. We worked with our two hands, our two eyes, and sometimes our two (or more) truths all at once.

Alysha would like to acknowledge the creative and caring contributions of all the participating students and staff at Renfrew Elementary School. This project would not exist without the tools and frameworks offered by members of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) collective and their Depth Education series. Thank you also to Mindy Zhou at Infinity Printing and Guy Brisson at SoftMotion for making the final printed images possible.