Chief Maquinna

Primary Students

with Artist Mishel Arrieta

Intermediate Students

with Artist fanny kearse

Toy City is a multigrade collaborative project all about creativity, community, and play created entirely by the students, using only found objects and their imagination. Using assemblage, paper mache and painting, 6 classes of primary students designed and built their own toys (grades 2 and 3) and younger primary students (K and Grade 1) envisioned and constructed a ‘playscape’ with terrain accessories. 

Inspired by the work of Catherine Duclos, who creates ADHD sculptures that are alternatively sensory avoiding or seeking, students created fidget toys, each one unique, imaginative and made to be played with by other children. Working with unusual materials, like found objects and throw-away bits bobs, students were invited to take risks and think outside the box, beyond making a representational object they might buy and transform them into something they are proud of and that can be used.

The idea that play requires working creatively for others, challenged students to design their art thinking about how others might enjoy playing with it. Students were invited to explore the materials and think about their preferences based on touch and feel. Do we like soft materials, or wood, or metal? What are the possibilities for this material? Does it bend? How does it move? Because the materials were unusual, Learning about how to make art collaboratively stretched students to let go of possession or full ownership of their piece. Letting go was also part of the making process.  

Problem solving was a big theme. Each material was unique, so if someone else had the material they wanted, they had to come up with alternative materials they could find to fit their intentions. Student had to also navigate what happens when something breaks? How will I connect the pieces together? Students worked generously and collaboratively together to help each other find solutions. This built community right into the piece. 

Everything involved working together - in the building and the playing. Once all the components of Toy city were made, students considered what kind of instructions they would we give for how to interact with it. Some of the rules were: “Take off your shoes” and “Be respectful of peoples toys. Do not take anything off” and “Put it back together if you break it.”  

Toycity is an interactive installation that invites viewers into art as a form of play. 

We invite YOU to think about how you would interact with the piece.  

What do you like or not like about the objects?  

Consider what the students might have been thinking about. 

How would you interpret or read different aspects of the landscape? 

Please place objects of your choosing on the landscape, to see how they might interact. 

Creating a safe and meditative environment filled with play and curiosity, I invited students to listen to their own inner strength. Students used their own faces to create plaster masks that became a canvas for poetic expressions of the self in words, and mixed media collage using foraged, found, and re-imagined that reveal the fears and triumphs of the self that we often hide.

Through literally having to be silent and create a mask of their faces, children go into their inner worlds of reflection, imagination and play. Students were encouraged to use the time under the mask as a meditative tool for how they can silence the world around them and attune the words of their hearts. By going inwards, feeling into the spaces we generally feel to embarrassed talk about, and sitting with the weight of holding oneself, children were not only able to start cultivating more compassion for themselves, but for the classroom community they are part of.

Each student wrote a poem, a testimonial of sorts, that was about sharing parts of us we don’t normally share; fears, or things that feel hard for us but teach us important lessons. In sharing these things students found strength, softness, inspiration and the will to orient to the complex truth of what it means to be human. As an artist, I have learnt so much the hinderance of perfection; students felt intimidated at first in writing but we reminded one another how we can find the poetry in the mundane, difficult, dark and beautiful things. We imagined ourselves in the future, as a villain, as an animal. We wrote poems as a group and individuals. We made up our own words! This whole residency has been about languaging that space between the sound and silence; that space where we discover who we really are.