26/01/2010 by James.

I was up in Lancaster last week, running my last 3 days of the creative outdoor learning project with the Nursery children (2 to 3 yr olds).The aim of the sessions was to give the pre-school staff a taste of creative ways that children can be supported to explore their local outdoor environment.

In the longer term, this kind of creative approach can enable staff and artist to work together, to begin to identify and follow individual childrens’ learning pathways, and better provide for their needs. In this case I was only working with the group for 3 days, so it was to be used of a starting point, for further creative and child-initiated work.

I concentrated on devising sessions that linked inside and out, and made the most of natural and recycled open-ended materials.

I’m keen to avoid re-inforcing the idea in schools and pre-schools of using one way of working indoors and one out, of the door being a barrier to taking drawing outside, or bringing mud and leaves in. Otherwise I think there’s a danger that  outdoor-learning or environmental art projects can lead to the perception of ‘nature’ as being something that you keep in a kind of bubble and visit occasionally, whilst your everyday life carries on as usual.

Over the three days I offered different materials and different ways of exploring places and materials to the children, with each day loosely labeled as Mark-making/Sensory Exploration, Small Scale Construction/Clay Work, and Large-Scale Construction/Role Play.

As usual the children didn’t necessarily use the resources in ways that fitted the labels or our expectations, and that was fine. The grouping and labeling of resources was a starting point, and the ability to work across different areas enables children at different stages of development, or with different interests, to experiment, make connections and learn.

The photos added here are from the last day, when different options were combined and laid out in the forest area, and mark-making and construction blurred into role play.

The first day involved getting very messy with a bucket of liquid clay, chalk, mud and graphite sticks as we explored mark-making in the forest area. The second involved collecting ‘treasures’ from the local area chosen by the children, and then exploring them with clay. So I didn’t get chance to take any photos from the first two sessions due to being pretty much covered in mud and clay.

So to sum up, great fun, very messy, and as usual very inspiring, to be exploring materials and environments alongside the senses and imaginations of young children.

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13/01/2010 by James.

  Not an original title for a post but hey… its everywhere at the moment, you can’t avoid it, and it certainly adds an element of excitement to early January. Things look fresh, shapes and patterns stand out like never before, and our embedded-ness within nature is in-escapable. The snow stops us from getting to places, covers up our cars and gardens, and takes over our lives… at least for a short while.

Personally I find it quite refreshing to see how weather can change the way we relate to the world around us. I know it can be hard, frustrating and even dangerous, but it also gives us permission to play, and to stop and stare at beautiful everyday things. It alters our perception of the world around us by literally changing the shape of things, the way that they look and feel. Wonder becomes a part of our lives as water freezes into clear sparkling blocks, and soft white clumps fall from the sky.

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07/01/2010 by James.

As with most people, at this time of year, I have had time to look back over 2009 and my achievements in my practice as an artist, and start to think about where I want to go from here.

It looks like 2010 is going to be really busy in terms of my participatory and consultancy work which is great - some really interesting and challenging pieces of work and opportunities to learn alongside children, teachers and other artists.

So I’m starting to think about what I want to focus on in more individual work, my own personal research through doing and making; what did I start in this last year that I’d like to build on, and what have I neglected that I could kick-start in the coming months?

I’m determined to spend more time outdoors and a little less on the computer, I want to explore the role of drawing and what it means to me, and I want to continue to make work which explores the value of time spent interacting with my physical, sensory environment - the landscape that I live and work in and the other ‘beings’ with whom I share it.

My work with children through initiatives such as 5×5x5=creativity, continuously reminds me of the need to support each individual to follow their own path, and to trust in their innate creativity. At times I look back to my own childhood and start to unpick where present interests came from and which ones I have left behind. Some of those that I didn’t carry on were so important to me so why did I just drop them?

Often in these moments of reflection, I get to the time in my life when I started my Fine Art degree and I see why I dropped those discarded interests, or ways of interpreting and exploring the world. My experience at college was a really valuable one, but the way that it was taught was not person-centred, or student led, it was much more a kind of channelling or grooming for a place in the art world. I think arts education has a lot to learn from the 5×5x5 model.

One thing that I am returning to more and more is drawing. One of my earliest memories is drawing birds from Tony Soper’s Bird Table Book. Drawing was something I did all the time, right through my life, until college, when it became something we did on Wednesdays, or a way of planning a piece of sculpture, or a drawing held tightly in a sketchbook.

What I want to return to is drawing as a means of exploring and making sense of the world, drawing for play, drawing for pleasure, without such a fixed end product in mind.

Wonder, the piece that I showed in the recent Salisbury Arts Centre Drawing Open, was not created as a drawing, but was exhibited as one. This has led me to start looking at different examples of drawing recently and asking other people what they think drawing is. Does anybody know?

The Tracey online journal - an electronic open access journal dedicated to the presentation of drawing and the discussion of drawing practice - inspired me by its inclusion of photographs of ‘found drawings’, so when I planned to be in the studio yesterday and couldn’t get there because of snow, I went out with Moshi (our dog) and looked around me at the marks and shapes highlighted by the fresh white snow that was resting on every surface.

Are these my photos my drawings? Are my collages drawings? Is the way that I gather together information, experiences, materials and people a drawing together that is my own way of drawing?

I’m not sure at the moment, I’m just going to allow myself to play with drawing, and to see what happens - to pick back up a piece of my creative ‘toolbox’ that I felt I had lost along the way.

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