Mentorship

We often describe our emotions in ways that connect to our bodies—“My heart hurts,” “Butterflies in my stomach,” or “It feels like my chest might burst!” These aren’t just figures of speech. Increasingly, science affirms a deep connection between our emotions, bodies, and minds.

In this 5-week residency at Lord Beaconsfield Elementary, students in Grades 4, 5, and 6 explored the idea that feelings can be data—valuable signals that help us better understand our personal histories, desires, and the world around us. Through a series of art-based inquiries, we visualized emotions, questioned how data is collected and interpreted, and reflected on the stories data can tell—through different lenses—about ourselves, our environments, and each other.

We began by establishing a “baseline,” using black ink to create foundational landforms representing emotions we’d like to know more about or move towards. For many, this included the soccer field—a place of joy. There were mountainous regions representing adventurous dreams, and places like the “Isle of Edgy,” where jumbled, intense feelings reside.

Each student built their own “data collector”—a personalized tool to track emotional responses—which they then translated into visual language using paper, ink, and a wide range of mark-making tools. Titles like “When Life Ruffles Your Feathers” and “There’s light even in the dark” reflected the whimsical and insightful nature of their creations. As the weeks progressed, we moved from individual reflection to more collaborative landscapes, weaving together natural places, communal zones, and mysterious unknowns.

Together, we became emotion scientists—using conversation, movement, and even stochastic methods to map our inner worlds. The residency culminated in the collaborative creation of story-maps. Students imagined traveling across each other’s emotional lands, linking them with blue and purple thread and crafting narratives around challenges—like a “potion that makes you believe you don’t belong” in the “Lagoon of Sadness.” We explored how the work of data scientists often mirrors the classic hero’s journey: a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. In some stories, the adventure began at the “Tree of Death” and found resolution on the shores of the “Island of Hope.”

Over the course of a five-week residency, students at Bruce Elementary explored how memory lives in us, and how it can be expressed, reimagined, and woven together through visual storytelling. Memory exists in many forms—some vivid, others fragmented. Some evolve into values we carry forward, while others fade or shift over time. Alongside these personal recollections is a collective memory, built through the stories we share, the images we make, and the art that holds our experiences. This residency is an effort to visually represent the journey of memory, emotion, and creative expression. Students began by exploring their own personal memories—learning to recognize, process, and express them through art. From there, they weave these individual experiences into something collective, shaping a shared story that connects past to present, self to others.

Guided by the core values of curiosity, empathy, and remembrance, students were invited to think about a memory they want to carry with them into the future. In the first 2 weeks, they each created a collage as a physical record of this memory based on the colours, sounds, feelings, shapes that were present in the memories they picked, which revolved around moments that made them feel loved and belonged, a lesson that they learned, or something they wanna keep with them over this past year. In the subsequent weeks, each class receives a set of copies of images from the other class, which, acting as agents of time, they are invited to crush, crumble, and even tear the memory copy. Then, using techniques of mending and creative scanning, they become beholders of somebody else's memory, repairing the rips while also creatively adding onto the existing picture as they scan the images with added movements and layered gels. The process is deeply inspired by the organic, multilayered ways that memory changes and altered through time. It ended up being a valuable process that allowed students to exercise a creative mode of artmaking that made space for changes to take place and restrained them from the tendency of perfectionism and result-oriented mindset. 

As we concluded the residency, each class connected the memory copies they worked with all into one big chain of images which they collectively curated through connections by shapes and colours. All the classes then created a collective installation, hanging these “train of memories” amongst the trees and the wind, observing and recollecting how each of their own memories have transformed through time, while observing and relating themselves to the shape of the collective memory representation they have created together. Through this process, they not only developed personal emotional awareness but also engaged in the powerful act of collective storytelling—building bridges between personal and shared histories, between one another, between ruptures and care. 

This year at Henderson Elementary the intermediate students explored ideas around the conflict and intersection between the natural world and modern development. We creatively imagined what nature lived here before western development and played with ideas of how nature could re assert itself. In animating elements of nature we explored our own connection to nature.

For our project, students worked collaboratively with the three intermediate classes to build a big cardboard city. We then brought elements of nature such as water, earth, fire, animals, trees and plants to life by animating with experimental materials such as sand, moss and paint directly under the camera in small groups. The animated natural elements were then projected onto our cardboard city for a final exhibition.

In this 5 week residency at Moberly School, we took time to observe, discuss and sketch nature. Following that, we discussed the concept of using art to share a message with others, looking at examples of how other cultures and artists have done this in the past. The students came up with messages about why they think nature is important, and/or something they want people to notice. ie;

What colour is the sky today?
Flowers are magical
How many birds can you see right now?

We then created design ideas for their art cards, which we called “valentines” or “love letters to nature”, as the program ended the week of Valentine’s Day.
The students then creates their valentines using fabric, wool and beads. Some of the children tried sewing and incorporated that into their pieces as well.
We then photocopied the cards, wrapped them in parchment paper and placed them around the school ground for others to find and pick up as gifts from the children.The original cards were then made into accordion books, one for each class.

In this mentorship-based residency, young learners were invited to explore the material, emotional, and conceptual dimensions of (im)permanence. Together, we asked: What does it mean to make and unmake? How do we hold memory in something that is meant to change or dis/appear?

We began with hands in salt dough; biodegradable, shifting, malleable. Students made their own dough, witnessing how simple ingredients combine to form something new, temporary, and full of potential. Through storytelling, shared prompts, and reflective dialogue, we explored the sensory and emotional processes of forming, dissolving, and letting go. To further challenge ideas of ownership and (im)permanence, students worked with dough made by their peers, emphasizing transience, exchange, and collective memory. Our inquiry expanded to include imprint-making; baking the dough into fossil-like forms that hold a trace yet evolve through heat. 

In a culminating act, each student received a second dough, this time air-dry and homemade, to walk with. Inspired by a video performance, we took our memory doughs outside, embedding our reflections in ‘memory rocks’ made during a slow walk around the school, ending in the garden. This movement through place and time invited contemplation on what it means to gather, to leave behind, and to witness transformation in relation to traces.

The residency concluded with a collective exhibition-making practice in the garden, transforming it as a place of making into a living gallery of memory rocks and imprints. This final gesture became a shared inquiry into what it means to work with a place as a site of making, and to understand exhibition as an evolving, place-based conversation.

Throughout, students documented their process through visual journals, tracking the ephemeral and embracing the instability of form, memory, and material.

Guiding Prompt for the Last Reflection

My memory rock reminds me of …

My heartfelt gratitude goes to Alex and Colleen for their guidance, ongoing trust, and encouragement in bringing my vision into practice. This work would not have been possible without their support and input.