Art Club 1.07: Family totem poles

THEME OF WEEK 1:07: Family totem poles

4th  to 9th March 2015

Art Club with Fundación Junto Con Los Niños - JUCONI 

facilitated by the Charlotte Miller Art Project in Guayaquil, Ecuador

IDEA AND AIMS:  For our new Art Club children to create another piece for the pop-up carnival float.  Having created images representing themselves we thought the next step should be to include their families and loved ones.  To achieve this we choose to use a typical Ecuadorian construction material: caña (thick cane) and to reference the Native American artform of totem poles. transform them into totem poles, which are seen in South America as well as in the USA.  

PROCESS: 

1. In the office courtyard, Emily and I washed and sanded down the canes thoughroughly, to remove the tiny spines that they are covered in (we learned this fact about cane the painful way, after I got an armful of spines while cleaning them.) 

Typical Ecuadorian cermaic figurines (centre) Valdivian Venus. 

2.   Emily and I downloaded and printed images of South American totem poles and typical Ecuadorian ceramic figurines, that we then mounted up into a poster for the children to reference during the workshop.  

3.  In Sergio Toral (above) the children worked with poster paints to illustrate their loved ones. Canes have natural divisions that fitted really well with the totem pole idea: groups of up to 4 children worked on each cane at a time to first draw their chosen person's outline into one of the sections in pencil and then to paint it.  One group of children chose to paint the whole cane in bands of solid colour first, then to paint JUCONI's stylised stick figures ontop in white at the end.  

This was an incredibly messy session, with paint getting over everyone as well as the floor, tables and chairs.  Some of the children and certainly we facilitators found this stressful.  The reason it was so much more messy than even our usual paint sessions was perhaps because of the children having to work simultaneuosly on single canes, and the large scale of the activity.  As the space of CNH that we use in Socio Vivienda is both smaller and more immaculate, being painted white, and as the children in Socio are typically more chaotic and inclined to fight, Emily and I decided that the sensible choice would be to work with oil pastels rather than paint.  

4. In Socio Vivienda (above) the children also started by drawing their figures into one of the sections of the canes and then coloured them in with oil pastels, defining the figures with a black or dark navy outline.  

In Sergio Toral another issue we had noticed was that the freshly painted totems got badly scratched in transit from the workshop to JUCONI's offices because of the back of the van being heavily loaded and the terrain we cross being incredibly bumpy because of frequent deep potholes in the earthen roads.  The solution to this for Socio Vivienda was to bring large sheets with us and wrap the canes individually as we loaded them into the van. This worked much better.   

MATERIALS: Reference poster showing totems and ceramic figurines. Sergio Toral: 10 x canes, poster paint, paintbrushes, bowls, palettes and cloths, paper and pencils. Socio Vivienda: 10 x canes (plus 10 x canes from Sergio Toral to work in the sections not yet painted) pencils, paper, oil pastels in a range of bright colours and also including black and dark navy. Large sheets of cloth. 

In a questionaire about their neighbourhoods in the same week we asked the older children in our newly opened Thursday afternoon teenager's group, "Who are the most important people in your community?"  Their answers included "my Mum", "my Dad", "my family", "my friends", "my Granny", one girl said "the co-ordinators" and explained that these are local peacekeepers, people who contain problems in the street.  These were lovely simple honest answers, and affirming to hear after seeing the parents, grandparents, siblings and friends appear throughout this totem pole activity.  It was also interesting because we had actually (misguidedly!) wondered would the children's replies include perhaps authoritarian figures, (church leaders?  teachers? gang leaders?).  A couple of kids even replied "you", gesturing at we cmap volunteers and our JUCONI colleagues.  So that was a really heartwarming moment for Emily and I!