Building Nests, Creating Meaning . . .
OAC Residency Helps Students Express Past, Present and Future
A three-week Ohio Arts Council Arts Learning Residency, conducted in April 2008 by visual artist Kate Kern and teacher Patrice Trauth, gave students at Ursuline Academy in Cincinnati an opportunity to make visible the school's history across generations and to weave their own unfolding stories into that history.
As the residency began, students and staff at the all girls Catholic preparatory school examined old yearbooks, interviewed retired Ursuline sisters and examined Kern's art, which often incorporates images and elements of the natural world. As students immersed themselves in exploring an artist's work and process, as well as in stories of the past and their own questions of meaning, a new artistic vision began to take shape.
"Nesting" was the metaphor that emerged. Students built nests in each other's hands containing objects that reflected their lives and the academic content learned in classes. Students in a chemistry class, for example, incorporated materials from the lab in one nest. They also added eggs from a nearby farm and other symbolic objects of their own making. They wrote poems about their nests with the opening line: "Once I built my nest of . . . . "
As a culminating activity, students created a large nest that became part of an installation in one of the school's open spaces. Surrounding that nest were paper oak leaves—the school's symbol—adorned with faces from old yearbooks. Intricate paper flowers, suggesting Cincinnati's German heritage, added beauty. A slideshow projected in the center of the larger nest showed images of students' hands holding their creations and text from their poems.
Heightening the impact of their installation, students also performed a choral reading of the poems.
Certainly, this three weeks of "nest building" will have a lasting impression on students at Ursuline Academy. In addition to refining their artmaking skills, they thought deeply, experienced beauty, bonded across generations, strengthened their ties with their school and deepened their self-knowledge.
Students built nests in each other's hands containing objects that reflected their lives and learning
This article was published in April 2009, Volume 5, Issue 1.
