Thornton School
Thornton, NH
The third school to participate in The Ground Beneath Our Feet, Thornton Central School, is located in a rural area, very near the White Mountain National Forest. I worked with the entire 4th grade, consisting of 30 students, usually divided into two different classrooms. Tanya O’Brien and Tina Anderson, the two fourth grade teachers at Thornton School, did a wonderful job of accommodating the mural project, in terms of physical space. They agreed to do all of their teaching in Tina’s classroom, allocating the other one (Tanya’s) for me to work with the students on the mural project. Having a dedicated working space was tremendously helpful for focus and concentration – both for the children, and for me as their facilitator.
In terms of scheduling, we decided to break up the students into four groups of approximately seven students each, and to give each group one fifty-minute period in the morning of each of the three full residency days. I tried something new in Thorton: instead of having successive waves of different children working on the same surfaces, I allocated one mural panel for each small group. Thus, the element of chance and unexpected change gave way to multi-session, small-group collaboration. Each student could reasonably expect to come back to the same surface she or he had left at the end of the previous working period. As a result, each mural took on the idiosyncratic aesthetics of its group members. One group, for example, decided to work in exuberant pattern, filling their mural surfaces with rocks, cracks, roots, and other strongly rhythmic sections. Another group, left to its own devices, laid down the original tape layers in repetitive horizontal bands from top to bottom, yielding a kind of laddered look. Unlike the murals in other schools, the Thorton paintings are single panels, and not diptychs of continuous imagery extending across from one panel to the next.
Day One (1/2 Day): Soil Digs, Collaborative Drawing, and Logistics
We were incredibly lucky with the weather: November 4th could have been a day of sleet and snow, or at least very unpleasant rain, but, on my drive over from Lebanon, after a big, bright rainbow over Plymouth, the precipitation stopped, and I arrived under calmed skies.
Andy and I, as visitors, began our day with the children by introducing ourselves, and each talking about what we each did, as a soil scientist and an artist. I remember the children’s strong interest in trying to understand what it might be like to live lives like ours. One little girl raised her hand and asked, “So, how much money do you make?” I laughed – count on children to ask directly what most others might simply wonder! My answer surprised me, and also felt satisfying. I said that, as they grew up, these kids would have the opportunity to decide what was really important to them. For myself, I had decided that I like to work with people, that I wanted to be involved in creative work, and that I wanted to have plenty of time to engage in my own independent projects. None of these things are earning me millions of dollars, but I can genuinely say that I am happy. I also pointed out that both Andy and I are still students, at what – from a fourth grader’s perspective – must seem very advanced ages. There is something about learning – the very activity these students are involved in every day – that remains satisfying to us, throughout the course of our lives. Andy explained that for himself, he had decided that he wanted to do work that was outdoors, and which benefited the environment.
Our group of thirty fourth-grade students, two teachers, three para-educators, Andy, and I, proceeded to the Thornton School’s outdoor classroom, in a pine forest on school grounds. Andy dug a deep forest hole that held together very well (instead of crumbling), thanks to the recent rain. After some exploring, color-matching, drawing, and sniffing around, we moved on to dig another pit in the school field (meadow) environment nearby.
Back indoors, we talked about how both scientists and artists work hard together to be as specific as possible about their observations, and invited the kids to do a remembering and drawing exercise on the whiteboard at the front of the room. What does a birch tree look like? One kid would come to the board, and start the drawing. How could we be more specific? Kids would volunteer that birch bark peels off in ribbons, and looks like it has eyes on it, etc. I encouraged kids to be drawing their own version of whatever we were tackling, while the group activity was taking place. Many of them did. We did this for about an hour, and the kids’ level of attention and engagement was impressive to me.
In terms of scheduling, we decided to break up the students into four groups of approximately seven students each, and to give each group one fifty-minute period in the morning of each of the three full residency days. I tried something new in Thorton: instead of having successive waves of different children working on the same surfaces, I allocated one mural panel for each small group. Thus, the element of chance and unexpected change gave way to multi-session, small-group collaboration. Each student could reasonably expect to come back to the same surface she or he had left at the end of the previous working period. As a result, each mural took on the idiosyncratic aesthetics of its group members. One group, for example, decided to work in exuberant pattern, filling their mural surfaces with rocks, cracks, roots, and other strongly rhythmic sections. Another group, left to its own devices, laid down the original tape layers in repetitive horizontal bands from top to bottom, yielding a kind of laddered look. Unlike the murals in other schools, the Thorton paintings are single panels, and not diptychs of continuous imagery extending across from one panel to the next.
Day One (1/2 Day): Soil Digs, Collaborative Drawing, and Logistics
We were incredibly lucky with the weather: November 4th could have been a day of sleet and snow, or at least very unpleasant rain, but, on my drive over from Lebanon, after a big, bright rainbow over Plymouth, the precipitation stopped, and I arrived under calmed skies.
Andy and I, as visitors, began our day with the children by introducing ourselves, and each talking about what we each did, as a soil scientist and an artist. I remember the children’s strong interest in trying to understand what it might be like to live lives like ours. One little girl raised her hand and asked, “So, how much money do you make?” I laughed – count on children to ask directly what most others might simply wonder! My answer surprised me, and also felt satisfying. I said that, as they grew up, these kids would have the opportunity to decide what was really important to them. For myself, I had decided that I like to work with people, that I wanted to be involved in creative work, and that I wanted to have plenty of time to engage in my own independent projects. None of these things are earning me millions of dollars, but I can genuinely say that I am happy. I also pointed out that both Andy and I are still students, at what – from a fourth grader’s perspective – must seem very advanced ages. There is something about learning – the very activity these students are involved in every day – that remains satisfying to us, throughout the course of our lives. Andy explained that for himself, he had decided that he wanted to do work that was outdoors, and which benefited the environment.
Our group of thirty fourth-grade students, two teachers, three para-educators, Andy, and I, proceeded to the Thornton School’s outdoor classroom, in a pine forest on school grounds. Andy dug a deep forest hole that held together very well (instead of crumbling), thanks to the recent rain. After some exploring, color-matching, drawing, and sniffing around, we moved on to dig another pit in the school field (meadow) environment nearby.
Back indoors, we talked about how both scientists and artists work hard together to be as specific as possible about their observations, and invited the kids to do a remembering and drawing exercise on the whiteboard at the front of the room. What does a birch tree look like? One kid would come to the board, and start the drawing. How could we be more specific? Kids would volunteer that birch bark peels off in ribbons, and looks like it has eyes on it, etc. I encouraged kids to be drawing their own version of whatever we were tackling, while the group activity was taking place. Many of them did. We did this for about an hour, and the kids’ level of attention and engagement was impressive to me.
Day Two: Getting Started
This day was dedicated to getting to know the students in each group, establishing a culture of creative collaboration, laying down the tape framework for each mural panel, and drawing a basic layer of oil pastel marks all over each surface. As an introductory prompt, I asked each student to tell me their name, and one thing that would help me to remember who they are. As I introduced the concept of drawing with tape, I talked about music, and how the pauses and silences are just as important as the sounds, making the analogy to the untouched black spaces that would be left by our tape-drawing. I asked the kids if they knew the word improvisation, or had heard of improv comedy or improv jazz. Some had, some hadn’t. I explained that improvisation means you enter into a creative process without any sense of what the outcomes will be. There is no wrong way. There is no one telling anyone else what to do with their imagination. Hearing one student tell another that his creature was in the wrong place, I introduced the improv rule Yes, and, meaning that when someone makes a move, the appropriate response is Yes, I see what you’ve done, and here is my creative response, taking our shared situation forward. It was delightful to hear the kids Yes, and their way through the base layers of their co-created imagery. Yes, Saturn is there, and here is a shooting star. Yes, that is a great place for a deer, and here is a butterfly fluttering nearby.
Day Three: Stenciling
The Thornton School schedule was a bit more compacted than I had anticipated, because students all needed to be in “specials” in the afternoons, and we only had mornings to work together. I realized that I needed to have the students cut and paint their stencils within the same fifty-minute period, in order to make time for the latex paint to dry, for final touches on the last day, for students’ own mini-murals. Day Three was by far the most rushed and hectic of the residency, but I found ways to adapt and improve midstream. As an educator, I appreciated the opportunity to teach essentially the same module four times in a row, as each different group arrived to work on their mural. After the first two groups had been through, with what I felt were some significantly awkward logistics, I had twenty minutes of recess and snack-time to consider how to improve the situation. I moved my materials out of the corner of the room and into the open. I gave a longer introductory talk, showing all the steps that would be involved in making and painting the stencils, instead of trying to introduce one step at a time, and then trying to meet kids needs on an ad hoc basis. I emphasized cleaning up and keeping track of materials as we went along, so that our working space remained hospitable. It worked! All four groups managed to draw, cut out, and paint on their stencils with in one short morning.
Day Four: Finishing Touches, Mini-Murals, and Celebration
At the end of my early-morning meditation session that morning, before setting out from home for Thornton, the word amplification came to me as a theme for finishing up the murals. Each group began by introducing themselves and making a sound that expressed something of how each person felt in that moment. All members of the group repeated back the sound a few times, and a gesture of welcome and understanding. Then, I encouraged each student to make their own sound, so that the whole group was sounding together in their own way. We started as softly as possible, then went to a kind of mid level sound, and then made ourselves quite loudly and forcefully. We then brought the sound level down again together, ending and a brief shared silence. I explained that what we had just done was called amplification: taking something that already exists and making it louder and easier to discern. I explained that we would be amplifying what was already in the mural by making smart choices to bring forward all the beautiful imagery that was already there, but perhaps to settle for an outsider to be able to benefit from. I used the incentive of being able to rip off the tape later once we had reached enough amplification across the whole surface of the mural. We added detail and environment around the stenciled passages, paid close attention to the edges of sections bounded by tape, layered thick, textured areas of color all over the mural surface.
After the tape came off, I gave each group a little bit of time to rework any sections where the tapes removal had left gaps they found unsatisfying. Some students seemed really drawn to fill in the black completely, and I discourage this, reminding them of the analogy of the pauses in the music. One group, who had created and especially beautiful negative shape forest, made of black lines, agreed among themselves that no one was to draw over those spaces.
At the end of this action-packed morning, I gave the students approximately twenty minutes to work on their own 12x12” mini-murals, encouraging them to swap stencils with one another, use tape resists as they had in the mural, and enjoy the opportunity to create a piece based entirely in their own imaginations. This went differently in each group: some were really enthusiastic about layering together marks coming from their fellow group members’ creature stencils. Some created images that felt like personal coats of arms, intended to be put up on the outside of their lockers.
In the time between the end of the final group, and the afternoon celebration of the completion of the project, I had time to grommet the murals, spray on the UV coating, and have a brief visit with Frumie and another artist. At 2:20, the whole fourth grade group came back into the classroom to see – many of them for the first time – the finished murals. Each group had a couple of minutes to prepare what they wished to tell the larger group about their work, and then a couple of minutes to present. I was delighted to hear some of the students use words like improvisation and amplification in their presentations, and to see the pride and delight with which they displayed their work.
This day was dedicated to getting to know the students in each group, establishing a culture of creative collaboration, laying down the tape framework for each mural panel, and drawing a basic layer of oil pastel marks all over each surface. As an introductory prompt, I asked each student to tell me their name, and one thing that would help me to remember who they are. As I introduced the concept of drawing with tape, I talked about music, and how the pauses and silences are just as important as the sounds, making the analogy to the untouched black spaces that would be left by our tape-drawing. I asked the kids if they knew the word improvisation, or had heard of improv comedy or improv jazz. Some had, some hadn’t. I explained that improvisation means you enter into a creative process without any sense of what the outcomes will be. There is no wrong way. There is no one telling anyone else what to do with their imagination. Hearing one student tell another that his creature was in the wrong place, I introduced the improv rule Yes, and, meaning that when someone makes a move, the appropriate response is Yes, I see what you’ve done, and here is my creative response, taking our shared situation forward. It was delightful to hear the kids Yes, and their way through the base layers of their co-created imagery. Yes, Saturn is there, and here is a shooting star. Yes, that is a great place for a deer, and here is a butterfly fluttering nearby.
Day Three: Stenciling
The Thornton School schedule was a bit more compacted than I had anticipated, because students all needed to be in “specials” in the afternoons, and we only had mornings to work together. I realized that I needed to have the students cut and paint their stencils within the same fifty-minute period, in order to make time for the latex paint to dry, for final touches on the last day, for students’ own mini-murals. Day Three was by far the most rushed and hectic of the residency, but I found ways to adapt and improve midstream. As an educator, I appreciated the opportunity to teach essentially the same module four times in a row, as each different group arrived to work on their mural. After the first two groups had been through, with what I felt were some significantly awkward logistics, I had twenty minutes of recess and snack-time to consider how to improve the situation. I moved my materials out of the corner of the room and into the open. I gave a longer introductory talk, showing all the steps that would be involved in making and painting the stencils, instead of trying to introduce one step at a time, and then trying to meet kids needs on an ad hoc basis. I emphasized cleaning up and keeping track of materials as we went along, so that our working space remained hospitable. It worked! All four groups managed to draw, cut out, and paint on their stencils with in one short morning.
Day Four: Finishing Touches, Mini-Murals, and Celebration
At the end of my early-morning meditation session that morning, before setting out from home for Thornton, the word amplification came to me as a theme for finishing up the murals. Each group began by introducing themselves and making a sound that expressed something of how each person felt in that moment. All members of the group repeated back the sound a few times, and a gesture of welcome and understanding. Then, I encouraged each student to make their own sound, so that the whole group was sounding together in their own way. We started as softly as possible, then went to a kind of mid level sound, and then made ourselves quite loudly and forcefully. We then brought the sound level down again together, ending and a brief shared silence. I explained that what we had just done was called amplification: taking something that already exists and making it louder and easier to discern. I explained that we would be amplifying what was already in the mural by making smart choices to bring forward all the beautiful imagery that was already there, but perhaps to settle for an outsider to be able to benefit from. I used the incentive of being able to rip off the tape later once we had reached enough amplification across the whole surface of the mural. We added detail and environment around the stenciled passages, paid close attention to the edges of sections bounded by tape, layered thick, textured areas of color all over the mural surface.
After the tape came off, I gave each group a little bit of time to rework any sections where the tapes removal had left gaps they found unsatisfying. Some students seemed really drawn to fill in the black completely, and I discourage this, reminding them of the analogy of the pauses in the music. One group, who had created and especially beautiful negative shape forest, made of black lines, agreed among themselves that no one was to draw over those spaces.
At the end of this action-packed morning, I gave the students approximately twenty minutes to work on their own 12x12” mini-murals, encouraging them to swap stencils with one another, use tape resists as they had in the mural, and enjoy the opportunity to create a piece based entirely in their own imaginations. This went differently in each group: some were really enthusiastic about layering together marks coming from their fellow group members’ creature stencils. Some created images that felt like personal coats of arms, intended to be put up on the outside of their lockers.
In the time between the end of the final group, and the afternoon celebration of the completion of the project, I had time to grommet the murals, spray on the UV coating, and have a brief visit with Frumie and another artist. At 2:20, the whole fourth grade group came back into the classroom to see – many of them for the first time – the finished murals. Each group had a couple of minutes to prepare what they wished to tell the larger group about their work, and then a couple of minutes to present. I was delighted to hear some of the students use words like improvisation and amplification in their presentations, and to see the pride and delight with which they displayed their work.
- Narrative and Photos by 2016 Ground Beneath Our Feet Artist in Residence Julie Püttgen