Kelly Boucher

3.3 Mapping Relations with Place and the More-Than-Human (Paper)

Kelly Boucher – Independent Scholar | Education Consultant | Early Years Art Specialist, Australia

Abstract:

“Children, like artists and makers, follow materials as they work with them. They join with materials as they circulate, mix, and mutate” (Kind, 2014, p. 873). This presentation reports on encounters between children, Place, materials and the art gallery as sites for dynamic, experimental early years practice/s. Using pedagogical documentation as a method for responding to emergent curriculum-in-the-making processes, this is a project about what is made possible when paper-as-material migrates from its multitude of contexts, crosses into art gallery/museum spaces and back into the community. Situated in the Central goldfields of Victoria, this project speculates that paper is not a Terra Nullius, rather, it holds trails and traces of its previous lives in the world – the forest, the supermarket, the office. When working with young children, we often strive to use “good” paper, meaning paper void of marks that indicate its stories and radical connectivities. Thinking alongside degraded gold mining land (named ‘upside down Country’ by Djaara, the indigenous custodians), we walk with paper and move slowly around our local places – tracing familiar pathways, making new/old connections, and wondering about the world outside of kinder. This project looks at what happens when paper and very young children meet and how children might attend to the materiality of damaged places and colonial legacies. By taking children’s encounters with materials, artworks, and place/s seriously and asking what is produced by these encounters, this work proposes that when children meet materials, they also meet all of their complex histories and affordances. Children have the capacity to meet this complexity with their own reciprocal becomings that are pedagogical as well as speculative. This work asks; what might become possible when we understand children as always-already implicated in a world shaped by ongoing colonialism and the euro-western insistence on separating human and more-than-human worlds?

Reference: 

Kind, S. (2014). Material encounters. International Journal of Child, Youth and Family Studies, 5(4.2), 865-877.