Wəkwan̓ əs tə syaqwəm

Primary Students

with Artist Rebecca Heyl

Intermediate Students

with Artist Liz Oakley

With the older primary students, Grade 2/3, we started out by looking for the funghi in our midst. Meaning the mushrooms that we found in the early Fall on the school grounds, growing up the side of trees or popping out of the ground. We considered the symbiotic relationships that occur under foot, the networks that we cannot see, yet we now know exist underground, connecting up trees and plants in beautiful ways to support the community within a forest. 

With the second and third groups of students, there were less mushrooms to be found as the days became shorter and cooler, yet we did find a plethora of mosses and lichens which kept alive our conversations about symbiotic relationships. 

With the final group of students, the kindergarteners, our studio sessions took on the theme of the circles or spheres that we inhabit. From the cozy familial sphere of the home to the bigger sphere of the classroom, to even larger sphere of the school as a community. We travelled outside our school sphere to visit the Cherry Blossoms within the larger neighborhood sphere. 

This work around of spheres is made visible in the Circles of Care mural in which students took care to connect up each of their classmates and in the process created beautiful entanglements similar to those of the underground mycorrhizal networks that support the forest as a community. 

If emotions are energy in motion and puppets are materials in motion, can emotions take form as puppets? 

Divisions 1, 2, and 3 took inspiration from motions to create expressive blob sculptures that visually embody two contrasting feeling words. These feeling words served as prompts for us to explore shape, form, dimension, color and movement. Finally, we brought our shapes to life as puppets, attaching handles to the back and exploring the movement qualities of the emotions that inspired us.Through our making, we explored new materials and techniques while becoming more curious, nonjudgmental, and aware of emotions, whether they be our own or others’. 

Divisions 4, 5, and 6 created colorful hybrid assemblages of cardboard shapes. Inspired by multiple elements in nature, and their expressive emotional qualities, we created creatures, landscapes, and abstract shapes. We paper mache’d with colorful tissue paper, finally bringing our puppets to life through movement and storytelling.

In both cohorts, students worked in the same small group for the duration of the project. We explored what it was like to work creatively as a team, imagining something together and using more than one set of hands to make it. Students were empowered to build large-scale sculptures out of reclaimed everyday materials such as cardboard and newspaper, learned how to use tools like boxcutters and hot glue guns, and completed their sculptures with paper mache and paint, all while developing their collaborative ethic and learning to trust the artistic process. We practiced thinking abstractly, and appreciating that there is never just one “correct” way for an art project to look; each group's puppet was completely unique.