The lino print project:
Conversation with Amane (work in progress)
Sometimes, it is very difficult to understand young children. Their arguments appear to be alogical. Their pictures seem to be chaotic. And, I have often been frustrated by my son,
Amane, who was born in 1994. Although I
wanted to understand him, it seemed to me impossible. Then, I read Anton Ehrenzweig’s The Hidden order of Art (1971), especially ch. 1.
Ehrenzweig argues that children under the age of eight look at the world
differently from adults. According to
him, whereas adults look at the world in an ‘analytical’ way, children under
eight look at it in a ‘syncretistic’ way.
Adults try to bring order to the world by classifying things. However, according to Ehrenzweig, children
do not classify things nor even differentiate them. And he argues that this allows children to experiment boldly with
forms in representing all sorts of objects without matching them against the
art of the adult. Hence it appears to
the adults, who have already learnt the conventional ways of representation,
that children’s drawings are ‘chaotic’.
Indeed,
when I ran the workshop at St. John’s School, Keele, in June 1999, with Sarah
Tombs, Keele University Sculptural fellow, younger children produced
wonderfully ‘chaotic’ pictures. For
example, one child produced a horse with five legs. She told me that this was the fastest horse in the world (because
it had five legs). Of course, for the
eyes of the adult, this picture has very small verisimilitude. However, I must admit that she grasped the
character of the horse very well in her drawing.
After
this experience, I thought that, to understand children, I should not analyse
or try to organize children’s perceptions of the world, but see the world
syncretistically.
So, as an experiment, I made a lino print, Noah’s
Ark By Amane; or How the Sinners Survived, based on my son, Amane’s
drawing. The original drawing by Amane
was made after we had a conversation about Noah’s ark. Amane told me that God destroyed all
‘baddies’ with the rain. I asked him
why there were still a lot of them about.
And this drawing was his answer to my question.
Through
this conversation and drawing, and re-producing his drawing in the form of lino
print, I felt that I understood him slightly better. Also, the outcome was interesting. So, I decided to pursue this line of project.
There is a famous work
by Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document,
and some might consider my project as the same kind. However, this is not the case.
Post-Partum Document is
essentially a mother’s record of how her son grew out of her. Here, Kelly dominates how this should be
recorded. Her son was the object of
her project. For my project, the object
will be conversations between Amane and myself - how he understood what I said
and vice versa. It will be a record of
our relationship.