Studio as a dance together

Sylvia Kind, atelierista

A studio, as conceptualized through the work at the Capilano University Children’s Centre and ECCE department in relation to various artists and Reggio Emilia inspirations and approaches, is a place of experimental interplay (Kind, in press). While materials, beauty, and aesthetics matter, the studio is not intended to be an art room, art area, exhibit, showcase, or artistic installation. A studio is an idea, an event, an experience, a working with and working through ideas, materials, places, spaces, and others. It becomes a studio in its use and through relational experimentation (see also Kind, 2013). We have imagined the studio as a space of collective inquiry that affords both children and educators time to dwell with materials, linger in artistic processes, and work together on particular ideas and propositions. Individual ideas and interests and the singularity of each child and individual are certainly valued, yet it is the collective and collaborative which we want to nurture, creating a relational space of investigating and creating together; constructing, making, and composing understandings. Thus, the studio is not conceptualized as a container for creative acts and materials, but an emergent space itself inherently creative and creating and constantly becoming (Kind, in press; Pacini-Ketchabaw, Kind, & Kocher, 2017). It is a space in movement.

At its heart, the studio has been characterized by collective experimentation and inventions, play-full engagements, and an attunement generated through sustained and learned attention. By this we mean that sensitivity to children’s processes and to movements and encounters with materials is not something immediately attained. It is cultivated over time. Creating a collective practice also takes time as we, educators and atelierista, learn to move with children’s movements and approaches and enter a dance together (see also Kind & Lee, 2017). We think of the studio as a space of encounters and negotiations, and connect to Bourriaud’s (2002) concept of relational aesthetics and art as encounter. This prompts us to consider that meaning is not held within a work of art, in the artist’s intention or idea, or in the materials used, or in the spaces created, but in the active exchange and co-construction of meaning (see also Kind & Argent, 2017). Thus, entering into a work of art, or an artistic space such as the studio, requires active engagement as meanings are constituted in the relation between things, in moments of disruption of previously held ideas, taking shape in social, relational, and interactive spaces (Kind, 2010). The studio takes shape as a work of art might. It is thinking in action.

We also borrow from Reggio Emilia their use of provocation and understand provocation as an intentional act of setting certain things in motion. Provocation is derived from the Latin, provocare, meaning to call forth, challenge, incite or instigate. Thus, we understand it as an action and are particularly interested in provocation as a call and response, or the continuous calling and responding so ideas and inspirations are kept in movement. For instance, we have been incited by others’ artistic practices and various artists’ studios, William Kentridge’s conceptualization of his studio, Room 13 in Fort William, Scotland, the atelier in Reggio Emilia, the impermanence of Andy Goldsworthy’s art, the collaborative and material inquiry inherent in Sharon Kallis’ processes, Kimsooja’s engagement with the everyday, Karina Smigla-Bobinski’s visitor-animated interactive kinectic sculptural work, and Jim Dine’s wall drawings, to name a few. Not engaging with these through acts of copying or application, rather being incited and provoked to engage in continuous experimentation (Pacini-Ketchabaw, Kind, & Kocher, 2017).

In engaging in this space, you are invited to take part in the studio’s evolution, to keep ideas in movement, while taking up a continuous provocation as reverberation and echoing. The invitation is to responsively engage with others and their processes, with the ideas, materials, and propositions within the space, as we engage in a dance together.

References (and sources for further reading on the studio and studio processes)

Bourriaud, N. (2002). Relational aesthetics (S. Pleasance & F. Woods with M. Copeland, Trans.). Paris: Les Presse Du Reel. (Original work published 1998)

Kind, S. (in press). Collective improvisations: The emergence of the early childhood studio as an event-full place. In Christine Thompson and Christopher Schulte (Eds.), Communities of practice: Art, play, and aesthetics in early childhood. New York: Springer Publishing.

Kind, S. (2013), Lively entanglements: The doings, movements, and enactments of photography. Global Studies of Childhood 3(4). 427-441.

Kind, S. (2010). Art encounters: Movements in the visual arts and early childhood education. In Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw (Ed), Flows, rhythms, and intensities of early childhood education curriculum, pp. 95-109. Rethinking Childhood series, New York: Peter Lang.

Kind, S. & Argent, A. (2017). Using video in pedagogical documentation: Interpretive and poetic possibilities. In Alma Fleet, Catherine Patterson, & Janet Robertson (Eds.), Pedagogical documentation in early years practice: Seeing through multiple perspectives. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage

Kind, S. & Lee, C. (2017). Moon bear and the night butterfly: Exploring the pathways of children’s drawing stories. In Marni Binder and Sylvia Kind (Eds) Drawing as Language: Celebrating the work of Bob Steele. Netherlands: Sense Publishers

Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., Kind, S. & Kocher, L. (2017). Encounters with materials in early education. New York: Routledge

Studio conversations

Materials have a life of their own in classrooms, and these lives matter immensely for how we think and act in classrooms.

Each material demands its own questions, its own concerns, its own ethos.

Thinking with materials transforms early childhood education, provoking educators to notice how materials and young children live entangled lives in classrooms.

Material conversations

Materials have a life of their own in classrooms, and these lives matter immensely for how we think and act in classrooms.

Each material demands its own questions, its own concerns, its own ethos.

Thinking with materials transforms early childhood education, provoking educators to notice how materials and young children live entangled lives in classrooms.

Studio pedagogies

Sylvia Kind

Studio pedagogies considers the early childhood studio as an event and experience. As an experimental and improvisational space of collective and collaborative inquiry the studio affords both children and educators time to dwell with materials, linger in artistic processes, and work together on particular ideas and propositions. It becomes a relational space of investigating and creating together; constructing, making, designing, weaving together, sculpting, composing, and proposing understandings. The studio is not conceptualized as a container for creative acts and materials, but an emergent space itself inherently creative and creating and constantly becoming. The studio, alive with materials, drawings, sculptures, memories, histories, speculations, and possibilities, opens to us and we become increasingly attuned to its cues, rhythms, forces, flows, and intensities. It is a space in movement, taking shape as a work of art might, and we move together with the studio’s emergence.

This is thought in movement, or “thought in the act” (Manning & Massumi, 2014), where every work is an experiment, a process of invention and thinking otherwise. As Ingold (2015) illustrates, this movement is not a support or addition to knowing, “moving is knowing” (p. 47). In the doing, creating, and enacting, through lively, sensuous, tactile, “motional-relational” (Manning & Massumi, p. 42) engagement, and tangled webs of maker, making, and material, we are drawn to respond with increasing fluidity and sensitivity. And so we aim to learn the studio’s rhythms, to activate, follow, twist, turn, and continue the movements in a multiplicity of variances, engaging together as Manning & Massumi (2014) would describe, in a co-compositional dance of attention.

References

Ingold, T. (2015) The life of lines. New York: Routledge

Manning, E., & Massumi, B. (2014). Thought in the act: Passages in the ecology of experience. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Clay ecologies: Field notes

Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw

CLAY FORCES US TO THINK

October 17, 2016

Clay arrives in a large, rectangular, cardboard box. I carefully pull it out and place sliced small slabs on the large canvas that covers half of the classroom. A group of curious children gather around the clay. Clay is quickly transformed. Rolled into various sized balls. Carried in tiny hands. Flung and thrown onto the canvas. Rolled, pinched and stretched. Jumped on. Foreheads and footprints are pressed into it.

Forms emerge: long and thin snakes, baskets that transform into nests. Eggs, large and minuscule. Lots of stories that invite the children to share ideas, to become more and more engaged with the specificities of clay.

‘We need more nests!’, two children exclaim. With more nests on the canvas, eggs become hatching birds, snakes become worms, worms become food for baby eggs. Birds hatch. We wonder with the children if the classroom will become a space for caring for the baby birds.

New and related stories continue to emerge: Bunnies hatch from the carefully moulded eggs. Educators ponder. We stay with the trouble that this chunk of clay brought to us.

Clay forces us to think. Children become, as philosopher Donna Haraway would say, “writers/thinkers/makers” who “remake worlds” through their clay stories. We are reminded that clay is a new participant in the classroom.

As air and clay interact, some children notice that clay becomes harder and harder to work with. Water makes clay soft and squishy again. Have the children notice this change? How might we invite the children to attend to these subtle transformations?

Clay is able to slow things down in the classroom. It invites the children to follow its unexpected movements as it interacts with hands and feet, with canvas, with floor, with air. In this ‘clay ecology’, the production that is going on has a life of its own.

What does this clay ecology demand from us?

NESTS AND EGG MAKING

April 6, 2017

Our clay exploration intensifies as children declare that we are going to ‘make nests’. Children gently learn how to shape the clay, what the clay needs to move, how the clay responds, where to press, how to push. The focus, though, is on the nests themselves.

We make nests: big nests, small nests. Each single nest has a story, a place, a protagonist. Each child shares her or his story as a nest is finished. Stories about the squirrels in the playground. Stories about the geese that try to find shelter in some of the children’s backyards. Stories about the cardinals that stay in the city during our cold winter. There are also stories about nests for dragons, nests for snakes, nests for bears, and nests for moose. So many nests. It seems as if the children never get tired of making nests.

Yet, it is not just about the nests. The nests need eggs, a child announces. How to make eggs? We show the children how to make eggs by placing a piece of clay in between the palms of their hands. This is not small task for little hands! Yet, it is the excitement to make more and more eggs that keeps the children going. We count the eggs we make. We carefully decide where each single egg will be placed. Which nest will want this egg? Which egg will want this nest? It matters. The children are meticulous about placing the eggs. They are also precise about the eggs’ shape and size. When they ask us (educators) to make an egg, they provide detailed instructions on what egg they exactly want.

GIFTING A NEST

April 7, 2017

After several weeks of nest and egg making, we (educators) decided to surprise the children. We met to make nests. We became fascinated with nests – as much as the children have.

Our clay nests are received with great excitement.  The children continue to make nests and discuss the possibilities for each nest.

We decide to study nests and project images of nests in the classroom during nest making time.  More stories, more animals join the inquiry as the children connect their nest making to the nests projected on the wall.  Even a wasp nest is added in the classroom.

NESTS IN THE CITY

April 8, 2017

A walk to the park delivers!  The city’s squirrels and a group of geese join the inquiry.  After children leave a nest besides a tree, a squirrel approaches to check the nest out.  Picking up the clay nest, the squirrel moves the nest to the other side of the tree. The children and the squirrels are now in a dance of communication.  Paying attention to each other’s movements, we become aware of each other.

A child is interested in leaving a nest high up on a tree for the squirrels.  She has noticed that the squirrels assemble their nests in the forks of tall trees.  How to get there?, she asks.  Another child suggests that we watch how the squirrel climbs.  “May be,” he says, “we can learn from them”.  We stop every time we spot a squirrel climbing.  We observe. We pay attention.  We slow down.  The squirrels, though, are fast.  They move up or down the trees so quickly that the children are having trouble grasping exactly how they do it.

Then there are the geese who flew into the park right at the time we were carefully placing the clay nests.  A child guests that the geese came into the park because they saw us with our nests.   “They are hoping to nest in one of our nests”, she says.  May be.  Why not?  After all biologists remind us that urban geese use human-built structures during nesting season… .

The geese sparkle much conversation in the classroom.  An educator tells the children about two geese who take care of their nest in a courtyard where humans have been prohibited to enter.

A few weeks after our encounter with the geese, a child announces that he was going to make eggs with clay (not nests) while the other children continue to diligently make clay nests to take to our next walk.  About half an hour later, an educator sees the child sitting in a corner of the room with approximately 10 large eggs on his lap. Not knowing what was going on, the educator invites the child to join the rest of the group in nest making.  Immediately, the child responds that he can’t.  “I’m nesting,” he says.

MAKING AS MODALITY OF WEAVING

April 14, 2017

In our nest making inquiry, we are inspired by Ingold (2000) who reminds us that “the forms of artefacts are not supposed to have their source within the human mind, as preconceived intellectual solutions to particular design problems” (p. 340).  In our inquiry is not the children who are always in control of what will happen in their nest making process.  The children are always open to what might emerge from the assemblages that are created.

Thinking with Ingold (2000) as we make nests, we might say that:

“[A nest] comes into being through the gradual unfolding of [a] field of forces set up through the active and sensuous engagement of practitioner and material. This field is neither internal to the material nor internal to the practitioner (hence external to the material); rather, it cuts across the emergent interface between them. Effectively, the form of the [nest] emerges through a pattern of skilled movement, and it is the rhythmic repetition of that movement that gives rise to the regularity of form.”