A Sculpture Exhibition

Today was a bright and sunny Thursday with a gentle breeze, perfect for our latest wacky adventure - an outdoor sculpture exhibition.

I think all children have an inherent appreciation of art, and the creative process in general, as evidenced by their incoherent outbursts of raw enthusasm as they explain the backstory to their small squashed bleb of playdough that is now apparently a ground-breaking new way to travel to Mars, the ingenuity and simplicity of which would make Elon himself envious.

"The wings are smaller to make it go faster"If you're interested - check this out

They don't seem to have the same jaded, cynical view towards what other people have decided to call artwork that we adults have, and it's such a joy to see them take an idea and run with it as far as their unencumbered minds will go.

So this outdoor exhibition seemed to be a perfect introduction to three-dimensional artwork for our children because not only was it conveniently held in an outdoor space they were familiar with, but crucially they were able to run around amongst the sculptures without knocking anything (or anyone) over. The three-and-a-half and two-and-a-bit year olds are both perpetual motion machines from wake-up to lights out, so this allowed them to burn off at least a little energy while discovering a few new ideas.

What we learned

We talked about how, as the observer, you are allowed to interpret the artwork for yourself, and that the artist may well have had their own ideas, but the joy of art comes from discovering new ones, and applying your own perception and thought process to an inanimate object. Humans are delightfully unique in our ability to look at a hunk of rusty steel, and then proceed to argue over what the hammer-wielding sculptor was thinking/smoking/avoiding while they bashed away in their secluded basement.

We briefly touched on how the sculptures are made, the materials used and why that made it more or less difficult and interesting for the artist. As a side-note, we have recently introduced the periodic table of the elements to the science-hungry three year old, and this represented a perfect opportunity to apply science to the real world, discussing which elements were used and why.

"He was delighted to see zinc and iron in the sculptures today."

We then sat on the grass, for a necessary mental decompression and a snack, and I asked them what they thought the sculptures were supposed to be. I'm conscious of my own tendency to try and explain my own thoughts to them, and I think it's important that they feel their own interpretation is equally valid, regardless of their age or experience, and as always they had some fantastic ideas :

A rusty bobble hat

A dried up meteor (3 year old) or a snake/part of a giant (2 year old)

The three year old then identified the specific part of the snake that looked like it contained the bones of a human it had eaten.

A person standing on one leg

The three-year-old was particularly keen to highlight the knee, the neck and the face. We'd recently been looking at some different types of armour during a visit to Dover Castle (a must if you're in Kent!) and he thought it looked like the leg was wearing armour plating, so it was a nice way to draw an association between the two recent activities. No doubt it'll be brought up over a spectacularly messy dinner next week.

We will definitely return to explore more of these sculptures and to see how their interpretations change on second inspection, and we'll also follow this up with some sculpture building of our own, we will let you know how that goes!