This year at Nightingale, primary students have been inspired by the spaces of transformation we find in nature: cocoons, buds awakening, and wings in flight. Working with found materials, story and movement, students entered into the experience of transformation through hands-on and embodied processes. Grade 1 classes created sculptural assemblages and drawings that transformed the space of their hallway into a cocoon forest; kindergarten students documented the process of buds awakening through light and colour explorations culminating in a collaborative transformation dance with shadow and video projection; Grade 2s and 3s are constructed transformation wings for a murmuration installation that will hold space for the hope of ‘becoming’ in the space between the now and the not yet. Artmaking itself is a practice of transformation that can enrich both experience and understanding of the self and one another through individual and collective imagination.
We learn that even in our socially fractured spaces of separation during this COVID pandemic, art can make visible the beauty of our belonging together in community, expressed in and through shared creation.
