Trudeau Elementary

This year at Pierre Elliott Trudeau Elementary School, newsprint paper (fragile, ordinary, easily discarded) was the primary material for exploration.

Throughout the year, students worked with their hands, setting aside tools so that touch could become their primary way of knowing. Each gesture of tearing, folding, rolling, crumpling, molding, and pressing became a way of thinking through touch. Rather than imposing form, they learned to respond to the material’s resistance, tension, and memory.

No tape. No glue.

Each week, hand-shaped fragments, built through many small acts of attention and care, were collected for the final session, coming together to form sculptural compositions. Without tape or glue, new ways of joining (such as twisting, interlocking, wrapping, stitching, and compressing) were explored throughout the process. Structure emerged through negotiation with the material, and stability was discovered through testing, adjusting, and trying again.

Over time, a quiet form of knowing began to grow: tacit knowledge shaped through repetition, observation, and hands-on practice. The hands learned what words could not fully explain. Small movements developed into sensitivity, and attention slowly became skill. In this process, paper became a collaborator rather than an object. Its fragility required gentleness, its unpredictability invited patience, and its hidden strength revealed itself through sustained engagement.

Perhaps this is what keeps a master craftsperson motivated over years of practice: craftsmanship is not mastery over a material, but an ongoing relationship with it: a practice of presence, a cultivation of resilience, and a way of growing into knowledge through making, with playfulness.