Mail Art + Pen Friends = Dear You Art Project
Take us where you think we should go. What is an important place to you? What’s a place that never fails to get you into a good mood? What does this place look like?
Ota se paikka mihin ajattelet että olisi hyvä mennä. Mikä on tärkeä paikka sinulle? Mikä on paikka, joka antaa sinulle aina hyvän olon? Miltä paikka näyttää?
あなたが思うところへ私たちを連れて行ってください。あなたにとって大切な場所はどこですか。いつ行っても気持ちの落ち着く場所ってどこですか。
Pippurit, Mantelit, and Tigers have been making art and sending it to each other since January 2018. Pippurit and Mantelit are from Päiväkoti Pihapirtti in Kontula, Helsinki and the Tigers are from Your School in Olari, Espoo. After months of getting to know each other, themselves, and their surroundings, they got to meet to have a morning of making art together!
At first, everybody was a bit confused about the other group. Once we got inside and we heard Project 3 from the Pippurit and Mantelit and from the Tigers, everything started to come together. "Oh! That's my voice!" "I remember that!" "It was winter!".
We listened to the sound recordings we had made in March. As we listened, we could draw what we heard. After a while we introduced the possibility to collage using road maps of Finland.
One of the great things about this session was how listening to these recordings triggered many memories and ideas that we could then play off of each other in our small groups. For example, one of the groups started to think of boiled eggs as one of the recordings involved a bird. One artist drew snowflakes because at the time of the recording there was snow on the ground. Now it's spring time and everything is in bloom!
At the end of the session we had a mini-exhibition where everybody could display their artworks and tell about what they drew. Each small group was a mixture of the Pippurit, Mantelit, and Tigers. Everybody was so kind and welcoming to their new friends!
Thank you, Museum of Impossible Forms for hosting Dear You!
Have a great summer everybody!
With love,
Arlene
The 5 year old artists at Päiväkoti Pihapirtti in Helsinki, Finland are making and sharing art with the 5 year old artists from Your School in Espoo, Finland.
During the third project students were asked to listen to audio recordings from their friends in China. They were instructed to draw or write anything they heard that sounded like a word that was familiar to them. They could use Swedish, Finnish, and English words for the listening exercise. As we listened students, wrote words that they heard or that came to mind and drew pictures to accompany the words. When the listening exercises was over the students used mixed methods of collage and coloring to complete their images. Using bits cut from maps they created lines connecting their images to one another. They really enjoyed listening to what their friends had to say. Thanks so much to our friends in China! We really enjoyed collaborating with you on this project!
Sincerely,
Rachel Kangas
The artists in Grade 2 (8-9 years old) at Taizhou Pheonix Primary School in Jiangsu, China are making and sharing art with the artists at Linguajoy (7-10 years old) in Helsinki, Finland.
As part of the process, the class made a map of sounds!
This project was a bit difficult for me to conceptualize and present in an easy-to-understand manner. Because English is not the mother tongue of most of my kids, I thought they would have a hard time "picturing" what sound looks like. But I did my best and gave the children fingerpaint and let them go wild.
To my surprise, many of them "got it" and what looked like colorful messes had a logic behind it. One boy in particular, who many describe as older than his 4 years, told me which colors corresponded to the quiet and nosy times of our day at the kindergarten. Pink is quiet, like our lunch time. But our morning circle is blue because it is loud. Green is quiet with some loud times.
The surface that I gave the children to paint on was plain white paper with a pair of ears on the left and right side. They all recognized the ears and some painted the entire surface with wild abandon, while other concentrated on decorating the ears first and then coloring the empty space between them.
When all the pieces were finished, I wanted something that would show the thought process of the children individually and the class as a whole. So I decided to create a map of the world and use the children's artwork to create a patchwork of the continents. Each patch was clearly marked with the child's name, so that they could find it on the map. The boy I spoke about earlier applied his color logic to the map and theorized that different areas of the world must be quiet or loud according to the color of the patches used.
