Places of Meaning

Where is home? What places matter? Is it places we love? Places we’ve been? Places we play? Maybe itʼs places our families and ancestors lived, or places that hold important memories. Maybe itʼs places where we feel safe. In this lesson inspired by a map of a meaningful place, students design interesting compositions and use watercolor techniques to paint their artworks.

Discussions of Place
Students who attend the Calgary Girls Charter School come from near and far to learn through a lens of identity, leadership, activism, empowerment, and social justice. In the art studio, they use these concepts to explore ideas visually, symbolically, and conceptually.

Students bring their diverse identities, experiences, and perspectives to their art-making as they continue to discover, craft, and refine who they are as humans, friends, and leaders. First, we engage in conversation and discussion about places that are important to different groups of people. Students may identify their own neighborhoods, places where relatives live, spiritual and/or cultural centers, nearby attractions, and vacation spots.

Considering Meaningful Places
At this point, I like to share my own stories about meaningful places. I might show a map of our family cabin, or where I attended university. I emphasize why these places are important to me: I get to enjoy quiet moments with family, and I watched my children learn to swim at our cabin. At university, I came to know myself differently and took risks in my learning.

I invite students to consider several places that are personally meaningful to them, and to share their “why” with classmates if they wish. While some students may be hesitant to reveal their personal ideas, others will be eager to share all their ideas. There is plenty of opportunity to interact throughout the ideation process, and this could occur as a whole class, in small groups, or using digital tools.

Choosing a Place
As students dive into their ideas together, they select one place to work with. I encourage them to choose a place that feels safe to speak about in front of their classmates. They can find a map using Google Earth or other apps and play with cropping or zooming in and out on the map. I ask, “What interesting shapes are beginning to appear?” Students can take a screen capture of their map once they find an interesting section that includes their meaningful place. It might be an entire country (lines might be rivers, roads, property lines, political boundaries) or it might be a few houses (lines might be property lines, roads, pathways, creeks). Using a printout of their screen capture, students can trace the elements they want to include in their artworks onto tracing paper. I encourage them to be thoughtful about what parts of the map to include and emphasize.

Transferring and Painting
Once students trace their composition, they can transfer it to their final painting surface. (We have used student grade watercolor paper and silk fabric.) They may wish to use a graphite transfer method, recognizing that they will need to trace the image in reverse on the tracing paper before rubbing the image onto the page. Students use watercolor techniques that they have previously explored to paint selected sections of their composition.

Sharing Artwork
We conclude this project by sharing our work on school hallway bulletin boards and on our classroom Instagram page. Students are invited to discuss the following prompts in developing their vocabulary and creative practice:

Are all artistic decisions made in advance? What choices does an artist need to make before beginning to work? (Creative processes may involve both spontaneous and deliberate effort.)
How might the viewer interpret or interact with your artwork? (Works of art can be interpreted differently depending on the experiences and perspectives of the artist and the audience.)
What did I learn through the process of working with color, watercolor paints, and tools?

Extensions

Use a picture book to introduce the idea of meaningful places, such as The Map of Good Memories by Franz Nuño and Zuzanna Celej. (See Resource.)
Make interdisciplinary connections to land, geography, and geometry.
Select meaningful places from a novel study or a country in the social studies curriculum to build compositions.
Use a different media for this project such as colored pencils, markers, or silk resist.
Engage students with resists such as masking fluid and/or masking tape to create white lines.