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Creating Eco-Friendly Sculptural Books

While I’ve been busy with collaborative eco-art installations with my students this winter, summer always gives me a little more time to work on my personal artworks. I’ve been experimenting with sculptural book-making in recent years – I love the combination of text and image, and the surprise of taking a traditionally flat object and making it come alive in three dimensions. So how do you make this technique more eco-friendly? Working with paper is a first step as it is easily biodegradable – that’s a natural when it comes to book-making. But I’ve also been drawing inspiration from a variety of sources, looking for ways to incorporate natural or found objects into my bookworks. I love the Spirit Books of Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord (http://www.susangaylord.com/the-spirit-books.html), who uses branches, grapevine and dried berries in this evocative book series. Mary Ellen Campbell’s books also incorporate a range of natural materials, often layering one on top of the other for a beautiful effect (find examples of her work on Pinterest.) Basi Irland takes a very different approach, freezing water and seeds into book forms that become part of a community performance as they float downstream (http://www.basiairland.com). If you’re looking for exemplars of how to re-use found objects and turn them into books, look no further than Terry Taylor’s EcoBooks: Inventive Projects from the Recycling Bin. Once you’ve read this book, you’ll be excited to try this yourself – you’ll be seeing possible books in everything you discard!

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HilaryInwood, June 3rd 2015 | Posted in eco art education, eco art readings, eco-art projects, Eco-artists, elementary project, nature-based art, pre-service project

Nature is the best art supply store!

The snow is just melting here, and we Canucks are emerging from the comfort of our well-insulated abodes to rediscover the beauty of a warmer natural world. I get excited about the idea of my gardens starting to grow again; spring, after a long winter, is always a hopeful time of year. One of the things I start to dream about is using more natural materials in my artworks: what new material can I find? What new material will find me? Nature is the best art supply store; the materials are plentiful, inexpensive, biodegradable, and if harvested properly, sustainable as well. I often get asked about the ethics of harvesting natural materials, especially in urban spaces; I think that, in many ways, going all natural is more ethical than using manufactured materials. The latter typically has a much bigger ecological footprint, and is more toxic, so moving to biodegradable materials can certainly be a positive step in the right direction. But ensuring that you are finding sustainable sources of natural materials, that don’t harm their living sources, is crucial. So a few ideas for including more natural materials in your art-making:

painting on leaves, rocks, or bark
dyeing fabric with natural dyes made from onions, beets, red cabbage, etc.
creating collages made with natural materials
pressing natural materials into wet clay to make tiles or ‘fossils’
rubbings of natural textures (leaves work beautifully for this)
blowing bubbles with food dye and pressing onto paper
making handmade paper with natural components such as seeds or leaves
using branches as ‘frame’ for weavings
using beeswax as pigment or adhesive

For more ideas, check out the following website:

Art and your Natural Environment http://arts.umich.edu/programs/funpages/environmentart/

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HilaryInwood, March 19th 2015 | Posted in eco art education, elementary project, nature-based art

Planting the Seeds for Environmental Stewardship

I worked on an environmental art project with a local Catholic school this fall, thanks to a great collaboration between Arts for Children and Youth (AFCY) and the Friends of Roseneath Park. Roseneath is a small park located in central Toronto, sadly neglected and full of litter from a nearby parking lot, until the Friends group contacted AFCY to help deepen the community’s sense of connection to it. They started with a community mural project this last summer – a photo of part of it is below. I was invited to work with local school children in grades 3 and 4 to heighten their awareness of the park, and hopefully strengthen their sense of stewardship for it. We used a ‘treasures and troubles’ approach, searching for the environmental strengths and challenges of their schoolyard at first, and then the park, working towards growing an understanding that both humans and more-than-humans share a desire for an environment that is free of garbage, with clean air, water, and lots of trees and plants. The children relished an opportunity to learn outside, even in the chilly weather of late October, and took wonderful photographs of the treasures and troubles they found in the park – one example is below, of a maple leaf on a park bench (both treasures from the perspective of the young photographer.) Back in the classroom, their drawings, photos and words formed the basis of their own sculptural books, one way to share what they have learned about local stewardship with others.

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HilaryInwood, January 3rd 2015 | Posted in eco art education, eco-art projects, elementary project

Using Digital Photos for Eco-Artmaking

Digital photography is a great technique to use for environmental art-making – while it’s not ‘no impact’ (is anything?), it is low impact. For a small amount of electricity students can have so much fun taking photos and then modifying them in so many ways; it’s a great form of recycling! I have been using the work of many of environmental photographer/artists in my classroom as starting points for eco-art lessons. Canadian Ed Burtynsky is known internationally for his large-scale photos of human impact on the earth; if you haven’t seen his documentary Manufactured Landscapes, it is excellent viewing. I haven’t seen his newest one, called Watermark, but reviews of it are also strong. (More about his work at http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/ ) The work of American photographer Peter Menzel is often found in my classroom as well – his series Hungry World and Material World are fascinating portraits of families’ consumption around the world; not surprisingly there are great disparities depending on where they live. I use his work to introduce eco-justice education and the power of art to raise awareness about inequity and its relationship to the environment. (http://www.menzelphoto.com/books/hp.php ) And finally the work of American Chris Jordan (http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/rtn/#silent-spring ) is also useful to introduce how environmental statistics can have a greater impact when given visual form. We’re experimenting with photography ourselves at OISE this summer by running a photography contest on our Learning garden – I’ll share the results in a future blog post.

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HilaryInwood, August 19th 2014 | Posted in eco art education, eco-art projects, Eco-artists, elementary project, pre-service project

Growing in New Directions

We are at the end of another jam packed year at OISE, so in amongst the classes, field trips and papers, I was very happy to have some time with children to work on a collaborative art project together. ICS art teacher Tara Rousseau generously opened her classroom to me again this year, this time with her grade three class. MA student Jennifer Ford-Sharpe also volunteered to help; she was central to the planning and implementation of the project. As learning about First Nations peoples is in the gr. 3 social studies curriculum, we used our new Aboriginal Education garden at OISE as the starting point. The students visited the garden in the fall to learn about native plant species and their role in aboriginal culture in Canada, and they made drawings of the plants in situ. Back in the classroom they learned about the importance of the four cardinal directions in First Nations cultures, and were inspired by the work of artists Christi Belcourt (Metis), Bill Reid (Haida), Jane Ash Poitras (Cree), and Carl Beam (Ojibway). This led the children to work on their own multi-media artworks using paint, clay, photographic transfers, and poetry. Their works centred on the importance of the cardinal directions in aboriginal culture and the connections between humans, wildlife, and plants. Such rich environmental learning! A few photos of the results are below, with more on the OISE website, found here: http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/ese/ESE_in_Practice/Eco-Art_Projects.html
Thanks to Tara and Jennifer for their partnership in facilitating this wonderful eco-art project!