Jo Dean – Disrupting young children’s usual visual art making through creating large-scale art installations situated within their learning environment.
The primary purpose of this study was to explore young children’s (2-5 years old) meaning making through creating, making and responding to site-based art installations across two New Zealand early childhood settings.
Firstly, the concept of art installations is distinctive and fairly new within an early childhood context. Art installations have been described in this project as using open-ended objects or artifacts that could be aesthetically created, constructed, or installed and arranged on-site, using everyday objects, textiles, and natural resources from the environment.
Embedded within a socio-cultural approach this project involved children’s engagement by invitation to take responsibility for seeking and collecting materials/found objects from the home and the community to contribute to the art installations. In this presentation, some of the findings drawn from the two art installations will be shared and demonstrate how the dimensions and size of the materials used within the installations disrupted the accustomed sizes of materials used in day-to-day construction play in Early childhood centres. Due to the size of the materials, it also disrupted the use of tools for children to construct with, and access and manage the making of the art installation. Children were required to learn different skills and techniques through these extended visual art practices, and this altered the many possibilities of children’s meaning making.
Biography
Jo brings a mix of professional and personal experiences as an Early Childhood Lecturer, Kaiako, Parent, Researcher and Professional Development facilitator. Jo has a keen interest in visual art and in particular engages in making textile art.
Jo is currently completing her Ph.D., where she investigated how young children make meaning through the framework of art installations as a method.