Mark Making and Feelings

This week I went to Cockburn Reach Primary Academy in Leeds. Reach is a SEND school  and all of the pupils who attend are dual registered with a main stream school. They spend four days a week at Reach and then one day at their main stream school.

The school have recently introduced an Energy Thermometer initiative to help children identify their feelings. I was asked to come and do a school project around the Energy Thermometer idea. The schools technology suit was a art studio for the day, as each class worked through a temperature on the energy thermometer.

Through art we can communicate our emotions, we explored feelings such as sleepy, calm, focused and fidgety. We used different materials to change the appearance of our mark making to help us communicate ideas.

The first group was KS1, we looked at sleepy and calm. We talked about our minds and discussed questions like What colour do we think in? Or even dream in? We looked at how sleepy feels ‘blurry’ and how we could make our materials look blurry. We looked at calm colours and gentle marks.

Sleepy - some children said this looks sad, I think so too.

KS2 looked at the word ‘focussed’. We used tried to create deliberate space between water colour marks and the white of the paper. We also looked at colours to communicate focus, we all agreed these should be bright colours and browns were not the best to communicate this.

Focussed/purposeful - the kids tried hard to keep space and not paint everywhere.

The final group KS3 explored the work fidgety and frenzied (maxed out). We used collage to communicate that when we reach a maxed out stage, its usually because of many different elements all at once making us feel overwhelmed. Collage was a good medium to explore this, we could change the images we were drawing and juxtapose them with colours and overlap images to show ‘frustrated’. We also used tape and acrylic paint to create a feeling of feeling fidgety. Triangles were used for sharp direction and all of these marks were put inside the silhouette of a body.

Fidgety/Amped UP

Frenzied/Maxed out - the kids all loved the shark motif

It was really good that the families of the children were invited to see the work at the end of the day. We had 10 - 15 parents come and the kids could talk to them about the work.

I enjoyed the conversations with the children, talking about feelings and art making together felt positive - not necessarily in a therapeutic way, but in a curious artistic way.