This post looks at the Slow Art Collective’s ‘Children’s Sensory Lab’ (January 8-21, 2017) at C3 Gallery in Melbourne, Australia.
Last week I visited the Children’s Sensory Art Lab at C3 Gallery in Melbourne, Australia. The lab was created Dylan Martorell and Chaco Kato from the Slow Art Collective – an interdisciplinary artistic group dedicated to exploring creative practices and the ethics of environmental sustainability, materiality, DIY culture and participation. The collective describe ‘slow art’ as:
“… the slow exchanges of value rather than the fast, monetary exchange of value. It is about the slow absorption of culture through community links by creating something together and blurring the boundary between the artists and viewer. It is a sustainable arts practice, not an extreme solution; a reasonable alternative to deal with real problems in contemporary art practice.” (Slow Art Collective website)
The Sensory Art Lab featured six different material environments spread out over the C3 Gallery space. These included a dedicated room for babies and toddlers, a giant loom and an archery area where children could shoot arrows at drum symbols (pics below)! A commonality between the activities was a focus on art making or aesthetic exploration through art. The Lab had an endearingly D.I.Y feel to it. Many of the materials were either recycled or everyday items being used in unfamiliar ways, giving a slightly eclectic and ingenious atmosphere to the show.
My favourite activity was the loom, a simple concept with high creative potential. The design of the weaving apparatus encouraged social interaction between people making textiles, opening up the possibility for new connections between people, materials and things.
Below are some pictures from the show. The collective also have a great website featuring all of their projects. Check it out: https://www.slowartcollective.com
The ‘audible touch space’ – an area designed especially for children aged 1-2 years and their carers. Babies and toddlers were able to touch the silver triangles that had motion sensors connected to them with pre-programmed sounds
A bucket of material off-cuts, ribbons, wool and thread
The archery area – children could fire arrows at the drum symbols, making loud bangs of sound
In this activity, children could make paper basketballs then throw them at the drum kits. Each snare drum (I think this is what they are called?!) was set at a different pitch, making different bass notes as the balls hit them.
This post looks at the National Gallery of Victoria’s slick new ‘Triennal’ blockbuster exhibition, including the gallery’s dedicated children’s space ‘Hands on: We make carpet for kids.’
I have spent the past few weeks in my hometown of Melbourne, Australia escaping the bleak English winter. During this time I have been fortunate enough to break up my thesis writing with beach swims and time with family and friends.
Last week I headed into Southbank to checked out the National Gallery of Victoria’s new contemporary art exhibition, Triennial. The exhibition is the first of what I presume will be a series of exhibitions held every three years that aim to showcase ‘the world of art and design now.’ The day I visited, the gallery was absolutely heaving with visitors young and old. I had actually never seen so many people inside an Australian art museum before. It was great to see the gallery so full of life.
The Triennial features an array of new modern and contemporary artwork from around the globe. There are also a bunch of newly commissioned, super slick, very Instagram-able installations including Kusama’s ‘Flower obsession,’ Ron Mueck’s ‘Mass,’ teamLab’s “Moving creates vortices and vortices create movement’ and Alexandra Kehayoglou’s beautiful ‘Santa Cruz River.’ The show is ambitious, polished and lively.
The Triennial’s dedicated children’s space, ‘Hands on: We make carpet for kids’ (2017) was comprised of four parts: a colourful wall where children could stick on triangular velcro pieces, a ‘maze challenge’ where children could poke pieces of rope through a plywood wall, an area where children could stick styrofoam pool noodles onto wooden knobs and a floor activity where children could make patterns using colourful wooden triangles (pics below). At first glance, the space looked immaculate. Lots of colours, beautiful wall-mounted installations for children to look at. The space was packed with young families who all seemed to be having lots of fun. It was also really inspiring to see the gallery making such significant financial investments in children’s activities. There appeared to be a gallery staff member stationed at each section greeting people and sorting materials.
At the same time I felt like something fundamental was missing from the children’s activities. While in the space I began to consider what exactly it is I love about art and learning. To me, the arts and education have allowed me to continuously think about and connect with the world in new and different ways. Artistic experimentation has allowed me to produce new relationships between myself, other people, ideas and the world around me. Looking at the children’s activities, I felt like there were limited opportunities for children to engage in deep artistic and creative experimentation. For example, in the rope activity, children were presented with small pieces of the material all cut to the same length. An instruction sign told people to put the rope into the holes. What children can and cannot do is nearly entirely pre-constructed and fixed.
I am really interested in children’s learning environments that are designed to encourage creative experimentation and are responsive to what emerges from this. For example, selecting materials based on their ability to transform (for example, clay has the ability to change form through adding or removing water), introducing art tools, equipment, artistic techniques or different conceptual resources that could encourage people to extend, challenge and complexify their thinking through art over time.
At the same time, everyone seemed to be having fun and perhaps that is the most important thing. Also, due to the sheer volume of visitors, the gallery may not have been able to cope with children spending more than two minutes on each activity.
The NGV Triennial is a fun museum experience. There are also some incredible artworks in the exhibition. High-brow theme park or contemporary art show – you decide!
This post discusses the symposium presentation ‘Material play: children’s learning with new, found and recycled ‘stuff’ given by Professor Pat Thomson, Nina Odegard and Louisa Penfold at the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) in Canberra, Australia.
Image: Bradley Cummings
On November 27, 2017 Pat Thomson (University of Nottingham), Nina Odegard (University College of Oslo and Akershus) and myself (University of Nottingham) presented at the AARE conference on young children’s learning with materials through play. Julianne Moss from Deakin University was the session discussant. The symposium was put together as a result of our common research interest in material-led play in early childhood education.
The symposium was built upon the proposition that many educators and artists working with young children are committed to play-based practices and understand this as critical to individual and social learning. The session focused specifically on early years arts-orientated play through asking: when children are ‘doing art’ play what are they learning with the materials they choose? The presentations explored the idea that when children are playing with materials they are simultaneously:
learning about concepts such as line, pattern and form;
learning about the properties and potentials of materials such as how they can be pushed, pilled, stretched and transformed;
learning what materials are and do in the world;
being called and directed by the materials, forming possible selves with materials and forming new relations with the world
being given the possibilities to work with materials without having to name, define or categorize what they are doing
Why is this important? Academics and education practitioners are becoming increasingly interested in ways that humans can and need to be de-centred in order to take account of the importance the material, both organic and inorganic, worlds in which we live. This is essential in creating discourses and practices that offer hopeful action in an ecologically and ethically challenged world. This also comes at a time when policy makers around the world increasingly position play-based early childhood curriculum as trivial and not sufficiently focused on knowledge and skills. Consequentially, we identify an urgent need to push further with discussion on why materials matter in early childhood play-based arts programmes and projects. Our concern was to not only explore and explain the importance of play in early childhood and to promote the value of the arts, but also to broaden our explanations of what this is.
Young children’s thinking with natural materials in art museums
Image: Louisa Penfold
Louisa’s presentation explored the invitations natural materials such as logs, leaves, sticks, stones and clay offer in young children’s play in art museums. Data generated in an early year’s art studio session at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, was used to consider the encounters (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2017) between children, artists, curators, artworks, materials and the museum space. Lenz-Taguchi’s notion of intra-active pedagogies (2010) – where one’s attention shifts from interpersonal relationships to the relations between humans and non-human entities – was drawn upon to consider children’s learning with and through artworks and materials in the art museum.
Descriptive examples of visual documentation including photography and video footage was discussed in relation to how the ‘stuff’ curated for the art studio provoked open-ended possibilities for children’s thinking and learning. The presentation concluded with the suggestion that through thinking with materials, new pedagogies are able to be constructed that allow artists, learning curators, children and their families to continuously produce and reconsider the relations between themselves, others, artworks, materials and the natural world.
Imagining immanent didactics
Image: Louisa Penfold
Nina’s paper focused on the concepts of aesthetics and aesthetic explorations, ethics and how these open possibilities for creative thinking, doing and being. Concepts of new materialism were discussed in relation to the potential they bring for expanded discourses and practices relating to recycling, sustainability and consumption.
The presentation drew upon data generated in a ReMida creative recycle centre in Norway. Results suggested that children were ‘rhizomatic thinkers’ (Dahlberg, 2016, p. 131) in their aesthetic explorations of recycled materials in which children’s learning shifted between disciplines to make use of the ‘vibrant matter’ (Bennet, 2010) and ‘how matter comes to matter’ (Barad, 2008). Nina also focused on pedagogical practice in which children’s process itself is valued, and there is a reduced or no focus on the result (Dahlberg, 2016). This builds on previous research out of the ReMida centre (Odegard, 2016) that argued that recycled materials can open up to the discovery of new ‘hidden’ pedagogical spaces, that produce meeting places for the emergence of new ideas (Odegard, 2012). The children´s exploration with vibrant matter like recycled materials seems to evoke creativity, curiosity, problem-solving and narrate stories. Through this, the paper argued for a paradigm shift away from the neoliberal way of measuring and categorizing learning and towards an emphasis on the collective and creative pedagogical processes.
What can rope do with us? Agency/power and freedom/captivity in art play.
Image: Bradley Cummings
Pat’s paper, co-written with Anton Franks, discussed an ongoing ethnographic study conducted within the ‘World without walls’ programme run by Serpentine Galleries in London. The programme supports artists undertaking residencies in one early childhood centre in central London. The residencies focus on different kinds of art/play that draw upon the artist’s practice and selection of materials for the programme. The presentation discussed data generated from Albert Potrony’s residency in which the artist elected to use large material objects such as card, plastic, foam and rope.
Throughout the sessions, numerous children were drawn to/called by the rope (Bennett, 2010). Perhaps unexpectedly, the children wrapped/tied up their teachers and the learning curator with the rope. The data suggested an explicit exploration of the kinds of power-laden relationships that exist between adults and children in educational settings. Drawing on field notes, photographs and interviews, the paper presented an analysis of the materials on offer and their affordances. The presentation concluded considering the material differences made by, with and through the rope, and probe further the ways in which it co-produced caring and ethical experimentations with power, agency, captivity and freedom.
Following the presentations, attendees had an opportunity to play with an array of materials arranged in the symposium space. As a group we then asked and explored questions such as why were particular materials chosen and not others? What was possible with the materials and what wasn’t? What about the play experience can be put into words and what can’t? Did you feel a desire/need to name, categorize or define your installation? What senses were used, and what feelings were evoked through playing with the materials?
Overall, we hoped that the symposium shared thinking and opened up new discussions around early childhood education, play, the arts and materialism. We were inspired by the questions and discussion amongst the group throughout the presentation and hope to build upon this in the future.
Image: Bradley CummingsImage: Bradley Cummings
References
Barad, K. (2008). Posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. In S. Alaimo & S. J. Hekman (Eds.), Material feminisms (pp. 120-157). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Bennet, J. (2010). Vibrant matter, a poltical ecology of things: Duke University Press.
Dahlberg, G. (2016). An ethico- aesthetic paradigm as an alternative discourse to the quality assurance discourse. 17(1), 124-133. doi:10.1177/1463949115627910
Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Going beyond the theory/practice divide in early childhood education: Introducing an intra-active pedagogy. New York, NY: Routledge.
Odegard, N. (2012). When matter comes to matter – Working pedagogically with junk materials. Education Inquiry, 3(3), 387-400.
Odegard, Nina, & Rossholt, Nina. (2016). In-between spaces. Tales from a Remida. In Ann Beate Reinertsen (Ed.), Becoming Earth. A Post Human Turn in Educational Discourse Collapsing Nature/Culture Divides. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Pacini-Ketchabaw, V; Kind, S; & Kocher, L. (2017). Encounters with materials in early childhood education. New York, NY: Routledge.
In this post, Simone Kling gives her top picks from the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art’s Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art for Kids (November 21, 2015 – April 10, 2016). Simone is an artist and gallery educator who has worked in the learning departments at the Denver Art Museum (USA), The Ipswich Art Gallery (Australia) and the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (Australia). Prior to pursing a career in gallery education, she worked as an art educator across primary schools in Queensland.
A family play in Justin Shoulder & Bhenji Ra’s Club Anak (Club Child) at APT8. Image credit: http://2sporks1cup.com
Since 1998 the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) has been working with artists to develop art projects, programs and interactive installations especially for children and their families. In 2006 the Gallery opened its second site, the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), home to the internationally renowned Children’s Art Centre. The children’s program at QAGOMA aims to connect children with contemporary artworks and the creative processes of artists. The Asia Pacific Triennialof Contemporary Art is QAGOMA’s much anticipated flagship display and celebration of contemporary art from the Asia Pacific region. Its most recent iteration, APT8, is a six-month exhibition featuring the work of over 80 artists and collectives who explore the theme of performative art through mediums such as photography, kinetic art, figurative painting, film and installation.
A major draw card at APT8 are the 12 children’s activities featured in the APT8Kids program, all of which have been developed collaboratively between contemporary artists and the gallery team. A unique aspect of QAGOMA’s programme is its approach to working in partnership with artists. This is done through a process whereby the Children’s Art Centre teamwork closely with particular artists in the development and design of the children’s spaces and programs. This not only fuses a stronger connection between child and artist, but also allows artist’s practices to be an integral part of the institution. The activities range from interactive creative spaces, multi-media hands-on installations and play-based environments that expose children and families to different cultures, histories and religions from the Asia Pacific region. All children’s activities are free and open daily 10am-5pm. A sample of the APT8Kids programme is featured below:
Choi Jeong Hwa – The Mandala of Flowers (2015)
Hwa is interested in mass-produced plastic objects and how they can be transformed from the mundane into something with inspiration and beauty. He encourages visitors to make mandala shapes out of various sized bottle caps, which at times of peak visitation, produces a collaborative kaleidoscope of shape and colour. The materials used are incredibly simple and accessible, which makes the activity enormously desirable for teachers and parents to replicate outside of the gallery. Out of all the activities on display at APT8Kids, Hwa’s space has appeared to be appealing to the widest age range. The tactility and overall sensory exposure provides not only children and adults with experiential and play-based encounters, but babies and toddles seemed to be just as captivated with the activity.
Angela Tia Tia – Looking Back (2015)
Tia Tia’s Looking Back installation is made up of four interconnecting spaces where cameras film different aspects of ones body as they pass through. Tia Tia is interested in the visitors seeing themselves in an unconventional way, which at times can become disorientating as the face is intentionally almost always out of view. With the ‘selfie’ obsession so prominent, this space encourages children to interact with a potentially unfamiliar aspect of themself and experiment with their own image. The activity forces children to physically interact with the space, engaging their whole body in a unique way.
Yelena Vorobyeva and Viktor Vorobyev – I Prefer (2015)
Yelena and Viktor’s I Prefer interactive installation features six fruit or vegetable templates and is accompanied by a video of the artists painting a green tomato to appear as a watermelon. Participants are encouraged to do the same with the templates, transforming the mundane into endless possibilities. The activity encourages children to explore creative possibilities within everyday objects, and prompts storytelling through drawing and imagination. Whilst observing the space, I saw many toddlers and parents working together on their templates, extending the age barrier and providing avenues for parents to collaborate in and facilitate their child’s learning.
Justin Shoulder and Bhenji Ra – Club Anak (Club Child) (2015)
Club Anak taps into every child’s infatuation with creatures and monsters. With various paper templates of fingers, eyes, body parts and miscellaneous shapes all designed by the artists, visitors can create a mythical avatar with the option of taking it home or displaying it in an immersive glowing environment. Adding the Club Anak room to the activity provides younger children with a kinaesthetic and tactile element to their experience as they crawl around the room acting like a monster, and provides older children with the validation of displaying their creations. Not too surprisingly many children decide to add their work to the room, making the space more alluring as it fills with imaginative creatures.
Heron, D & Cull, T 2005. Artists Collaborating with Kids, Artlines, Dec 2005, pp. 28 – 33.
Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Museum Collaborative
In addition to the Queensland Museum, the Queensland Science Centre and the Ipswich Art Gallery (formally known as Global Arts Link), QAGOMA was a partner of the QUT Museums Collaborative’s research group (1997–2004). The collaborative worked alongside gallery curators and educators to study young children’s responses and participation in exhibitions and learning programs. The publications and findings from the QUT Museum Collaborative have formed the most significant body of research into early years learning in museums and galleries to date. Please see below for a list of publications.
Anderson, D., Piscitelli, B., Everett,M. (2008) Competing Agendas: Young Children’s Museum Field Trips. Curator: The Museum Journal, 3, p. 253-273.
Piscitelli, B., Weier, K., & Everett, M. (2003). “Museums and young children: Partners in learning about the world”. In Wright, S. (Ed.) Children, meaning making and the arts. Sydney: Pearson.
Anderson, D., Piscitelli, B., Weier, K. Everett, M & Tayler, C. (2002). “Children’s Museum Experiences: Identifying Powerful Mediators of Learning”, Curator, 45 (3), 213-231.
Piscitelli, B. & Weier, K. (2002). “Learning with, through and about art: the role of social interactions”. In Paris, S. (Ed.) Perspectives on object centred learning in museums. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Piscitelli, B., & Anderson, D. (2002). “Young Children’s Perspectives of Museum Settings and Experiences”.<http://www.fed.qut.edu.au/ec/museums/JMMA-2001.pdf> Museum Management and Curatorship, 19 (3), 269 – 282.
Piscitelli, B. (2002). Young children’s interactive experiences in museums: engaged, embodied and empowered learners. Curator, 44 (3), 224- 229.
Piscitelli, B. & D. Anderson. (2000). “Young children’s learning in museum settings”, Visitor Studies Today, 3 (3), 3 – 10.
Piscitelli, B. (1997). “The challenge to enjoy: Young children as visitors in museums”, Journal of Museum Education, 22 (2 & 3), 20 –21.
Piscitelli, B. (2006) “Keeping Queensland museums and galleries on top and out-in-front with programs for children and young people”, Artery, 2 (1), 3-6.
Piscitelli, B., Weier, K., & Everett, M. (2003). Enhancing young children’s museum experiences: a manual for museum staff. Brisbane: QUT.
Piscitelli, Barbara, F. McArdle & K. Weier (1999). Beyond Look and Learn: Investigating, Implementing and Evaluating Young Children’s Learning in Museums. Brisbane, Queensland University of Technology.
This post features a case study of the children’s exhibition programme at the Ipswich Art Gallery in Queensland, Australia.
From 2011-2015 I worked as a children’s curator at the Ipswich Art Gallery in Queensland, Australia. The Ipswich Art Gallery is a special place for children’s creative learning with a well established and renowned children’s exhibition program. The city of Ipswich is home to a very diverse and predominantly low socio-economic community. The art gallery is currently one of the most visited in regional Australia. In my work and travels across Australia, America, Europe and the United Kingdom I have never come across anything quite like it.
Over the past 15 years the Ipswich Art Gallery has developed and presented over 40 in- house children’s exhibitions. The programme is informed by a set of guiding principles which include; children’s exhibitions are curated forchildren not adults and learning begins with creative play. The Children’s Gallery is open daily from 10am-5pm with almost all programs being free of charge. New exhibitions are presented between every 4 – 12 weeks meaning that that there is continuously new creative experiences on offer for young visitors. In many ways the Gallery is more of a children’s art gallery than an ‘adult’ art gallery. At the same time, it is quite distinctly different from the American children’s museum movement. I often thought of the children’s exhibition programme as a combination of a Reggio Emilia atelier, the creativity/art slant of a children’s museum and an art gallery.
During my time at Ipswich, I worked as part of a creative team of curators, designers, artists, educators, academics and arts practitioners on the conceptualisation, development, and delivery of the children’s programme including exhibitions, baby and toddler workshops, school programs and children’s art festivals. A sample of these projects are featured below:
Wild Thing (2012)
Featuring Troy Emery’s colourful taxidermy animals and Nicole Voevodin-Cash‘s giant grassy hill, children created their own crazy costume and turned into a ‘wild things’ for some fun kinesthetic play. The exhibition also featured a dedicated play space for babies and toddlers.
Light Play (2013)
Children (0-8 years) used light as a creative material for making ephemeral art using overhead projectors, light boxes, shadow sculptures and reflective materials. Light Play! was presented across three different programs: a 75 minute workshops for kindergarten and early primary students, baby and toddler workshops and drop-in sessions for the general public. The exhibition was influenced by the Reggio Emilia philosophy which promotes creative play through experiential and discovery-based learning. Image credit: top left/bottom: Ipswich Art Gallery, top right: peacefulparentsconfidentkids.com
Children (6-14 years) worked with conceptual artist Briony Barr to create collaborative ‘expandable’ drawings out of electrical tape. These sessions were run as 90 minute workshop in which children learnt about rules in art (Sol le Wit, Jim Lambie, Richard Long) and rules in nature (bifurcation, Fibonacci sequence) and how rules can be used to make unpredictable works of art. Children were then introduced to the medium of electrical tape and set a series of challenges to create 2D and 3D drawings that covered the room using rules. A video of a similar project to what was presented at Ipswich can be found here.
Construction Site (2007, 2009, 2013) In Construction Site children unleashed their inner-engineers to design and build cubby houses using foam blocks. The 2013 iteration of the exhibition included a giant ‘Ball Run’ in which visitors used tubes and recycled materials to create tracks for balls to roll down.
Image credits: far left weekendnotes.com.au, far right brisbanekids.com.au
Electronic Art (2015)
Children made squishy play-dough sculptures and wearable art pieces using electrical circuits and flashing LED lights. Throughout a 90 minute workshop children were introduced to the basics of electronics and electronic art including contemporary artists using circuitry in their practice. They were then able to use conductive play dough (5-11 year olds) or textiles (11-14 year olds) to make a fun artwork to bring home. The program combined interdisciplinary skills from visual art, technology and science in a creative art making workshop.
Art. Play. Children. Pedagogy. 