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Materials and Processes

This "soundscape with accompaniment" is my final artefact for my sound explorations. It includes sounds from my three self-made instruments; the spanner chimes, the sand shaker and the bottle of stones. I played these along with the natural soundscape of my garden; these natural sounds included my chickens clucking, a bird cooing from my roof, and amazingly, a roll of thunder before it started raining on the leaves of the lemon tree above me. I edited the order and layered these sounds on my computer to make the final artefact.

There is no doubt that I have become a better listener since starting this inquiry and am more aware of the soundscapes that surrounds me at all times.

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https://padlet.com/bronwen68/Bookmarks

My encounter with Paper has its own individual padlet. Please follow the link above to discover how I explored the paper materials and travelled through the various stages of my relationship with Paper to arrive at the final artpiece shown above.

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For this inquiry I spent time thinking collaboratively with many different materials and artistic languages, and the ensuing encounters have been the source of much learning. I have discovered the agentic power of materials, unwrapped my own hidden capabilities as an artist and, most importantly, seen for myself the enormous potential of open-ended Art experiences to tap and release previously unexpressed emotions. The freedom to which I refer in my inquiry title, therefore refers to both the freedom to explore materials in any art encounter and also to the aforementioned freeing of emotions. This double aspect of the meaning of freedom through Art is what I will take away from this unit of study.

Paper was the first material that I encountered and it broadened my understanding of the benefits of Art as a window to our emotions. Paper showed me how vital it is that we allow children as much freedom as possible to explore materials in the classroom. Paper demanded ways of thinking from me that were instrumental in transforming my view of myself as an artist for the rest of the inquiry. The sheer magnetism and energy of Paper as it brought everything and everyone into its orbit, made its agency in the process impossible to ignore.

These fundamentals of material agency and relational materialism (Taguchi, 2011) have held true throughout all of the materials I experienced during my art encounters, as you will see as you explore this padlet inquiry. The interactions between myself and the other participating actors elicited a range of responses in me: for example, Paper in collaboration with Dog, Child, Scissors and Balloon, gave me confidence. They buoyed me when I was unsure how to proceed and inspired me. In the case of my encounter with Junk, the sculpture itself at one point toppled over and seemed to be actively trying to deny my feelings of freedom just as I was beginning to feel giddy with them, but this led to me becoming more assertive. In the case of the light artscape, the materials, and the particular way they cast the light as we moved them, suddenly brought into focus a new way of seeing light as play. Myself and the two children imagined something new at exactly the same time,  which was a very affecting shared experience.
In these small but meaningful ways, each art encounter has  revealed parts of myself to me. I hope you enjoy looking at and listening to the artefacts that emerged.

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For my encounter with light I borrowed a couple of light rayboxes from the science department of my childrens school and we set them up on a table in our garage, the only place where we could effectively block out the daylight. This exploration took time and began with a cautious and tentative exploring of the technology involved. We were worried about their suitability, whether the rayboxes and associated prisms and mirrors would be too fragile to play with confidently, or limiting in scope. All of this proved not to be the case. In the end, light was one of my favourite encounters because of the constant discoveries and surprises elicited from simple movements of the materials, and because of the fact that I shared the pleasure of these discoveries with two other humans.
The two rayboxes sent out beams or rays of light that could be manipulated in endless ways by the collection of prisms, mirrors and coloured filters that could be placed in front of the light. We went very quickly from our initial cautious wonderings to total immersion into an imaginary world.

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During my encounters with sound I learnt about the technique of deep listening as researched by Pauline Oliveros (2001). I spent some considerable time in my garden with my recording device and listening attentively to every small sound.
Listening stimulates emotions, as being in my garden did for me, and connects us to the wider world. By paying attention to sounds, it awakens us to listening to ourselves, which in turn helps us to discover who we are and what we want. Learning to listen this way also opens us up to "welcoming others and their differences” as Rinaldi stated in her chapter entitled The Pedagogy of Listening (Edwards et al., p235).

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After the light and sound and paper experiences, with their almost limitless opportunities to explore and engage, I unexpectedly found myself creatively blocked again when I approached this encounter, due to the relatively few pieces of junk, mostly boxes, that I had been able to gather. I was interested in my awareness of that sense of being limited because when I began this art unit I had felt that I needed constraints to shape my work, but here I was, railing against those same constraints. I have grown!

I began though, as before, by picking up the recycled items, holding them, observing them and putting them down again. The washing powder box obviously made me think about laundry and about how many washloads I must have done, not just with that one box, but over the last 20 years of parenting four children, and so it felt heavy and made me feel heavy too. I decided that this box was going to be the base of whatever this artwork became. I looked around for anything else that made me feel heavy. The empty box of dog poop bags; a reminder of always picking up after others. That went on top of the OMO box. Then I picked up the empty box that our new kitchen lights had come in. I ran my finger over the fragile sticker and wondered. As that became the next box in the tower, I suddenly knew where the flow of this encounter with junk was taking me. This tower of household rubbish was going to represent me. Grounded by endless cleaning and caring but keeping the home lights burning, with a fragile sticker right where my heart was.

From then it was easy, tissue boxes were a head in the clouds and for eyes, old lights that had gone out. The final teetering mini-me model seemed all too dreary though for my mood and so I decided to clothe her. I chose newspaper pieces that spoke to me about freedom and added a belted paper top and skirt. A small empty gin bottle went inside the chest cavity and a couple of tonic cans became legs, to symbolise a lighter step!

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I set this up in the lemon tree in the garden as a central music making instrument I could play, while immersed in the natural soundscape around me. The ribbons holding the spanners are my daughter’s hair ribbons and I liked the idea that she was 'letting her hair down" somewhere as I played along with the sounds of chickens, birds and at one point, thunder and raindrops. I also tapped on the tree branch with a stick. This was a joyful and liberating encounter.

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Children can be taught how to listen rather than just hear. Expose them to a range of different soundscapes, including silence, and ask them to describe the small details of what they hear and also how the sounds make them feel. Often our emotions are louder when the world is silent. Can they give voice to those feelings and share them in a group? They can learn that there is no wrong answer when it comes to listening as we may hear the same sounds but listen differently. If these listening experiences are offered as a regular experience they can help children come to understand that there is value and interest in sharing different views with others. Empathy is developed this way.

I love this question from Pauline Oliveros (2001) which asks, “What if you could hear the frequency of colours?” I think this would be a wonderful question to ask children while they are listening in any rich soundscape, such as in a park or at the beach. This would get their creative ideas flowing and could be approached from two perspectives:
1) Encouraging children to imagine and paint the images and colours that a piece of music or soundscape inspires for them, or
2) Have them try to create their own sounds or rhythms to echo the feelings they have when they see different colours.  A great book for this second option is Colour Me by Ezekiel Kwaymullina (above) as it richly evokes each colour of the rainbow with text and images. Children could be encouraged to create their own instruments to match a particular colour, and then play them in turn as a group along with the book reading.

Another favourite comment I read from Oliveros (2001) is her description of listening as being “a necessary pause before meaningful action”. This can be interpreted in so many ways especially in term of this Inquiry into Freedom. Firstly, as a teacher I read it as offering freedom to the child’s voice, meaning that when we listen to children we are pausing to understand their true intentions, before we can act in the best ways to help them learn. Secondly, in terms of implications for the classroom, it could mean that children are encouraged to listen to the sounds of nature with pause to act upon an emerging spiritual connection to the land and subsequent environmental awareness, perhaps in some form of environmental activism (O'Brien, 2016).

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Connection with freedom

I was just about to add arms when sadly, at this point, there was a disruption to my assumed control of the process, and the instability of JunkLady caused her to topple off the table and smash her lights. I almost felt real pain. I fought back the discouragement, refused to accept defeat and lifted her up again. I dusted her down, and spruced her up, and even added some dancing arms. Yes, she would probably fall down again in a future stiff breeze but for now, she was rocking it. The parallels were not lost on me!
This artwork for me, represents freedom from my own perceived limitations of what I can achieve through art. I now know better than to just accept limits, whether imposed by myself or others.

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Children and parents can be encouraged to bring in loose parts, recycled items and boxes etc from home. Such recycling is a philosophy readily embraced by kinders and children. Some rolls of masking tape and some building space is required as well as big containers in which to place all the ‘junk/treasure’ that is brought in. This recycled art/construction area can be a permanent fixture of the classroom.
We can see children’s artworks from junk and recycling as ‘itinerations’ of the world, where the children/artists are joining in with the flows and forces of the materials around them, repurposing them and giving them new life and meaning (Gandini, 2015). As the children create their imaginings, the junk objects are freed from their has-been status as unwanted items and are renewed.

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This art response was inspired by seeing the Dog walk through the mud in the back garden and leave a trail of pawprints on the path. I wanted to share his freedom and feel some of that insouciance and so I took my shoes and socks off and squelched my toes in the same mud.
I captured my footprints on the blue paper roll and was immediately reminded of the common refrain to 'leave only footprints and take only photographs'. I thought about how time passes and footprints get covered up and eventually all we have are the photos. I imagined my footprints being covered over time by nature and so I scattered leaf litter from the garden over the footprints, followed by a sprinkling of sand. I enjoyed the sound of both these natural materials falling onto the paper. My experiences of listening during this inquiry have really embedded the idea of sound as an agentic contributor to my art experiences. I sprinkled more sand to repeat the pleasure and then listened to the dove on the fence comment on my handiwork. These sounds are captured on the video above and enhance the artwork.
A gentle wind was moving the leaf litter over the paper, almost as if trying to erase the footprints, just like how I had imagined. This reinforced the meaning of this artwork to me, of time passing. To capture the memory I took a photograph of the arrangement as it was, in that moment. I printed out the photograph and placed it over the artwork, which by then had already moved on and shifted slightly. The whole experience reminded me of the passage of time and how nothing stays the same.

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Shell details bring out the fingerprint details

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Painting my thumb - fingerprint is clear

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Printing my thumb - can I see the fingerprint?

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Getting brighter but fingerprint details still hard to spot. Paper forms mounds in response to the paint.

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It is the details of the shells that show us the lines of the fingerprints

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As I began my encounter with paint I realised how far I had come as a developing artist when I was not intimidated by the big piece of blank paper. Instead, I was just curious as to what was going to emerge.
I began by painting myself. Just my thumb. Perhaps it was a memory of making marks with muddy feet, but the sensation felt right. I looked closely at the thumb and saw all the fingerprint lines and creases, highlighted by the paint. Paint had made them more visible.
I made a single print with my painted thumb at the bottom of the paper. I noticed how discreet I was still being in my art. Nothing too ostentatious yet. That confidence will come. I note that as a teacher I must encourage and nurture children in their art through this same confidence building process. Time and experience and freedom matter.
I couldn't see the fingerprint lines in the print I had just made so I tried again. And then again using red paint, in case it was a contrast issue with the paper. The fingerprint lines and swirls were still not very clear. But I did notice that the paper had puffed up into little mounds where the paint was. Paper was once again moving and responding to paint in its own communicative way.
I had learnt from previous encounters, that enlisting the help of a third party can reveal hidden clues and meanings in my Art. I scattered some shells on the paper and then the meaning of this encounter suddenly became clear. Somehow, in the presence of the shells, the tiny details of the fingerprints could be seen more clearly! The intricate natural details on the shells focus our eye and attention and allow us to see detail elsewhere. This is another example of Taguchi's relational materialism (Taguchi, 2011) and reminded me again of the ability of materials to somehow interact and come into connection to produce an outcome greater than the sum of their parts.

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Paint is a bedrock of most Early Childhood Art experiences already and this is a good thing. However, encounters with Paint can be enhanced by bringing Paint into relation with other material objects in order to discover hidden secrets. Including shells in my encounter for example brought out the smaller details in both the shells and the thumb prints.
Involving other materials can be through assemblage or through painting in Nature, or through the decorative painting of bodies etc. My encounter with Paint started with a large piece of paper and some big brushes, with my intention being a large display of colour and bravado, but it ended up with me looking very closely at the tiny details of my thumb prints and becoming introspective. The outcome of my encounter, once again, was not anticipated.
In the same way, children should be provided with large pieces of paper upon which to paint; positioned on the walls, the floor, the undersides of tables, the rocks outside, wherever they wish. Then they should be encouraged to use whatever other materials they wish to give the paint access to their own distinctive voice and the freedom to alter course should that become necessary.

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This encounter for me was very much about the freedom to let go of outdated rules: Rules about Art being clean and tidy, rules around what constitutes Art, and rules about following rules. For Early Years learning, taking Art outside has to be a key way to let go of many of these restrictions.

The Reggio Emilia philosophy gives the environment the status of Teacher. Similarly, the natural environment is considered pedagogical by our First Nations Peoples in the way that spending time listening to the land can awaken a Connection to Country and evoke a response (Harrison & Skrebneva, 2020). Junk, loose parts, natural materials, soundscapes, and light and shadows are all accessible outside and this is where Art for young children should begin.

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Freedom of ideas

All of these encounters with different materials have revealed something of myself to me and this has been a revelation. In every instance I have become more aware of my senses and of the world around me and each time this has felt like a spiritual awakening; an unlocking of my mind and thus, a form of freedom, as my ideas are set off in multiple unexpected directions. This is referred to as ‘rhizomatic flow’ by Deleuze and Guattari (1987).

Freedom from constraints
As educators we need to be aware of these multiple possibilities in our children's art and try and prepare the room for every eventuality, rather than preparing for a constricted predetermined set of art outcomes. We must intentionally teach the arts in the broadest sense and offer a wide range of experiences to the children. This may be challenging within time and space constraints but is what must be done to truly offer artistic freedom to the children. I can only begin to imagine how beneficial these experiences would be for children in terms of their growing awareness of a sense of self and their emotions, as well as their appreciation for the natural world.

Freedom of materials and techniques

I now firmly believe that children should be given complete  freedom to experiment, play, explore and push boundaries with the materials offered to them; that they should be free to mix and co-opt techniques and materials in ways that may be unconventional and messy.

Freedom of time and flow
Young artists should be focussed on their experience and the exploration of tools and materials, not on the passage of time. By keeping their artwork free from deadlines, and giving them ample opportunities to come back to their work later, children can feel calm and relaxed as they create.

Freedom from disadvantage
Art and music and nature are levellers in that children can communicate through them in a shared language.  Polysensorial experiences like the ones I have explored here can be accessed with relatively limited budgets and can bridge diversity within a group and promote equity.

Freedom of the unknown

Finally, I have elucidated the mystery factor that has kept me so engrossed in these encounters during this unit, ever since my first encounter with Paper. It is the element of  surprise that has hit me every time at some point in each process when I have discovered something new, either about the materials or about myself. In the classroom I will endeavour to provide the rich environment necessary to help children experience this feeling of wonderment while they too encounter materials. This will in time enable them to project their emotions through metaphors and symbols and thereby communicate their lived experiences (Wright, 2015).

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Paper in its very essence, seems to represent freedom. Materially it does so because it is light and flexible and easily moved, but emotionally too it can carry the meaning of freedom in its association with the written word and transmission of ideas.
The typical classroom might have stacks of paper available to children for drawing and painting on but this inquiry has shown me that paper can be so much more versatile.
Within my classroom I would ensure that Paper of all kinds was available for children to explore, as a tangible material in its own right. Children would be encouraged to crumple it, tear it and throw it, and mould it and remould it into new creations. I would continually challenge children to find new ways of being with Paper that expressed meaningful ideas for them.

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In this encounter there was diffraction in a literal sense, as the light split up upon passing through small apertures and prisms, but we can also use this term in the relational terms of Barad (2007), which is to consider how the different materials come into relation with one another. Hultman and Taguchi (2010) made the observation that “we can never reflect upon something on our own” and that it is always “done in the midst of a complex network” (p536). In the context of my encounter with light, I shared the experience with two children and multiple light affecting objects. Any observation, or movement of a prism or other artefact by one of us, led to an exclamation from another, which led to a further  discovery or action by the next. We operated as one 'complex network'. Therefore the ‘artwork’ shown at the end of the video above, of a welcoming sunrise and city of lights greeting the pilot of a toy plane, originated and flowed from all of us in connection.
Barad (2007) explains this phenomenon by saying that diffraction “does not produce ‘the same’ displaced, as reflection and refraction do” (p803). In other words, this wasn’t for us just the bouncing of ideas about light off each other, it was the transforming and reimagining of the meaning of the light rays to create something new altogether.

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The light artefact shown above of a city light scape at night was merely a point along a Deleuzian line of flight (1987) and was only the beginning of a whole hour of further play for my children. Once I left the garage, they retrieved a box of toys from their bedroom and started playing airports with the addition of their toy planes. I left them sharing the joy of small worlds in a dimly lit garage. This was hugely informative for me as a developing teacher, as I witnessed them becoming totally immersed in dramatic play after what had been a tentative start, just plugging two lightboxes into the wall of a dark garage. I believe that this outcome was entirely due to me not having any preconceived ideas as to what the outcome might be and therefore not, even unconsciously, influencing that outcome. It was the genuine freedom of experimentation and openminded creativity that led us to generate the cityscape. I will certainly re-enact these ideas of exploration of light and its transformation within my workplace.

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·   Light can offer us a different way of ‘seeing’ or a different perspective. It took the three of us to generate this light artefact and so in a classroom I would encourage small groups to explore together in their encounters with light.

·   The brightness of lights like in these rayboxes is in such sharp contrast to the darkness of the room that it calls children to attention (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2015). Darkness is necessary for the encounter with light to be optimal. The two children and I were so lost in our play with light in the darkness that when someone opened our garage door to see where we were and let in the daylight, all three of us called out in unison “Shut the Door!!” which made us all giggle and feel very connected to each other for that moment. Darkness would have to be planned in advance in a classroom context, maybe by blocking out windows with black paper or utilising store rooms and cupboards. Like the experience of silence, children need time to become accustomed to being comfortable with darkness. We can teach them that being in that space where there is less sensory stimulation can often awaken an internal voice.

·   By providing accessory boxes of small perspex prisms, coloured filters, lenses and small mirrors, children can generate patterns of light and move them, direct them and transform them in countless ways to create multiple scenarios like those above. As happened in my light explorations, once children have built up a relationship with light and learnt a little of its magical ways, then small toys can be added to the environment, allowing children to extend upon their narratives. This can also lead to shadow puppet shows, dramatic play and more, extending the social aspect of this encounter.