From Our Hands to Yours / Transformation and Community Connections 

Over the school year, students and teachers from Lord Beaconsfield Elementary engaged with community-based artistic inquiry, self-expression and art therapy techniques with interdisciplinary artist Kathryn Wadel. Bridging their environmental studio practices from the school-wide project Ripple Effects (2023/24),  students were invited to engage with contemporary approaches to art making with plastic. From acrylic paints to upcycled everyday materials, young artists explored our plastic world within the framework of community-care and environmental stewardship. At the confluence of the chorts’ studio practices and artistic processes, the students’ works demonstrate moments of community care, creative curiosity, self expression and connections to the physical world.

In the studio we decolonized the notion of gift giving and receiving – redefining “gifts” not as objects, but as actions in reciprocity. What unique gifts do we have to share with the world? Students thought deeply and expressed their experiences, perspectives, skills, and actions in reciprocity with community and nature. In the studio, Kat invited students to create individually in their manila paper sketchbooks and as a community on larger print-making paper to foster deeper connections with peers and the environment through studio practices. 

Each cohort was invited to engage with the environmental impact involved in art-making practices and navigate the life-cycle inherent to materiality.They were introduced to microplastics found in acrylic paints and how to “mico”-manage and repurpose plastic waste through artistic practices. Where do our materials come from? How do we use them? Where do they go once we are done? Is that the end or the beginning of something new? 

Culminating in a pop-up exhibition at the school the students’ work was displayed to activate areas of the school through artistic intervention.Transforming the school hallways, students’ artwork creates moments of pause, reflection and connection. Situated within social-practice art, their artwork activates institutional school spaces with artistic interventions to foster new ways of seeing and being – shifting our personal and communal relationships with the space and how we choose to inhabit it for today and for future generations.