2P
aper
Movement
Figure 2.1 Materials live in the world in multiple ways
Sylvia Kind, Author
Paper flaps, floats, glides, hovers, soars, tears, rips, sways, flies, rolls, gathers, crumples, crimps,
accepts, folds, bends, covers, swishes, flutters, pauses, bunches, scatters, yields. We breathe it
in, we blow it out. We launch it, chew it, paste it, wear it, elevate it, wrap with it, read it, draw
on it, flip it, collect it, paint it, propel it, drape it, color it. We open, envelop, fill, empty, catch,
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tie, write, arrange, twist, turn, rearrange, uncover, recover, unroll, wave, fasten, crinkle, tickle,
clothe, amplify, circulate, sweep, undress, redress.
This chapter begins with paper: ordinary, everyday newspaper. The Vancouver Sun, to be
precise. This local newspaper had been delivered every morning to houses, condos, and
apartments; read once, sometimes two or three times; and then discarded in curbside recycling
bins. We gathered several armloads of newspapers from these bins, enough to immerse
ourselves in paper as we embarked on a journey of orienting ourselves to ways of being with
materials with children. We started with “useless,” “used-up,” ordinary paper waiting to be
removed and recycled. We interrupted this material’s flow as it moved from bin to recycling
depot. We wanted to try to understand paper, to understand what it might mean to be with
paper, as we stepped into the flow of paper on its way from one place to another. We
wondered: What if we think of paper as a material worthy of attention? A material with its
own movements, histories, and possibilities? What if we think of paper as a material with
potential to move us as we work with it?
So often, paper is regarded as a surface that we use to hold messages, lists, marks,
meanings, drawings, paintings, stories, news. But after we have read the day’s headlines, we
no longer need the newspaper. Once a painting fills a page, it is dried, rolled, and stored inside
a child’s cubby until it is taken home. We wanted to interrupt this flow as well.
How do we get to know paper in other ways, in surprising ways? Tim Ingold (2011) writes
of materials as riddles known through their stories. If paper is a riddle, what are its stories? To
know paper in this way is not just to describe its properties or attributes, but to learn how it
moves and to describe what happens to it as it shifts, mixes, modifies, mutates. Ingold
emphasizes that materials are their verbs and their doings: We paper. We paint. And so we
wanted to pay attention to materials’ action words.
When we take paper into the studio to pay close attention to it, we find that nothing about
it is static and everything is in motion. Things move, bodies move, materials move, the air
moves, everything moves with a different rhythm and intensity. Life is filled with motion, new
becomings, and emergences. Movements may be felt, observed, dramatic, collective,
choreographed, barely perceptible. There are movements toward and movements away,
movement as emergence—what comes of these moments and what is produced. There is
movement as acting and as being acted on. In learning materials’ movements and doings, we
find our way to asking other questions. We learn to move with the materials and attend to the
ways we are moved in response. We learn that learning itself is movement.
Singularity
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Eli sits at the table in front of a wet papier-mâché bowl. He carefully smooths slippery
paste over one long rectangle of newspaper and gently pats it into place on the bowl. He
pauses, considers its placement, and then pulls it off, turns it over and around, pauses
again, examines the piece, and reorients it to another spot. We notice his acute
observation, the measured contact between hand, bowl, paper strip; paste drying and
constricting on hands; paper sticking and coming loose. Eli appears to be drawn by
particular strips of paper. He touches and lifts certain ones, searching their surfaces,
responding to the curve of the bowl in a rhythmic and concentrated interplay of hands,
turning bowl, paper strip, glue, breath. His breath is slow, and our own breath slows in
response. If this were a musical piece, it would be the deep, resonant playing of a cello,
the movements of bow on string elongated and extended. We breathe deeper as we follow
Eli’s intimate attention to each paper strip’s singularity.
We started our paper experiments with newspaper because it was abundant and easy to
find. It had not been purchased new as if it were “empty” and awaiting inscription. This
newspaper had already had a life and a purpose. It had been in people’s homes, dropped in
mail slots, held in hands, perhaps read over morning coffee, taken to work and cafés before
being discarded. It had not been produced for children’s use, and although it was familiar to
many of the children, the content of the news items was not fully available to this group of
toddlers. Yes, they could make meaning of the pictures and occasionally recognize a letter or a
number, but they did not regard the newspaper in a normative manner. Rather, they were
drawn into the particular. Not a newspaper as a thing and not paper in general, but specific
bits of paper in particular situations. A singular piece, a singular situation.
One morning there is a delightful rush of activity in the studio as mountains of
newspaper strips are placed into clear plastic tubs in preparation for making
papiermâché. Kale climbs into a tub filled with newspaper strips. Paper strips cover his
legs and torso, tickle his knees as children scoop more paper strips and empty them into
the bin. Kale squirms in response and the children laugh, running to collect more strips.
Paper takes flight, alights in the bin, and settles all around the sides. Like water filling a
bathtub, the level of paper rises in Kale’s tub. By now, paper covers the floor, litters
children’s hair, drifts through the studio. “Don’t forget that one,” Kale says, pointing
across the room. Paper strips are everywhere, but we follow Kale’s finger as he points to
one long, wavy strip.
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The paper, in its singularity, posed a puzzle to the children and the educators: What was this
paper? Why was it here? What was it for? What could be done with it? What could it become?
We wanted to find out. So we began with ordinary materials already in motion, and we
followed children’s movements: The turn of a hand, the flick of a finger, the rise and fall of the
body’s breath, the tearing of a narrow strip of paper drew us to notice each scrap and every
subtle movement. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990) describes moments like these as “flow”:
bodies, materials, thoughts, and breath move together outside of time. Soon we were noticing
the rhythms and flows of making, of bodied sensations, of how we were affected by the
movements of making.
The Movements of Making
In early childhood, materials are closely connected to making. They are often set out for
children to make or create something with, frequently with the assumption that children are
full of ideas just waiting to be expressed through these materials. Yet, as Hillevi Lenz Taguchi
(2010) describes, “the material world acts on our thinking as much as our thinking acts on the
material world” (p. 49). We are moved by materials and are prompted by the materials’ own
characteristics and liveliness. It is never as simple as idea directly imposed on form.
Making, then, whether it results in an actual object or is engaged in as a series of events,
involves an alchemic process of developing a rhythm and feel for the material (Ingold, 2013).
Ingold (2011, 2013), relying on Elkins, describes alchemy as the ancient practice of struggling
with materials—finding out what happens to them, what they feel and look like—and learning
to follow them as they are mixed, heated, cooled, or combined with other elements and
materials. The alchemy of paint, for instance, involves “bring[ing] together, into a single
movement, a certain material mixture, loaded onto the brush, with a certain bodily gesture
enacted through the hand that [holds] it” (Elkins, cited in Ingold, 2013, p. 28). In this way “a
material is known not by what it is but by what it does” (Ingold, 2013, p. 29) and making
includes a multitude of movements and gestures.
A group of children gathers in front of the clear glass studio door with a container of
water and a large bowl filled with paper strips. One by one, they dip a strip of paper in
the water and apply it to the door’s transparent surface. The warm morning light
streams in through the glass, speeding the paper’s drying. Some strips fall off while
others adhere. The educators join in the rhythm of figuring out the relationship of glass,
water, paper, light, and temperature. Too little liquid and the paper won’t stick; too much
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and it slides down; just enough and it is held in place.
Dónal O’Donoghue (2015), citing Eve Sedgwick, describes making as a three-way
conversation with a material: “What will it let me do?” “What does it want to do?” “What is it
that I want to do?” (p. 107). “These tugs, pulls, pushes and heaves,” O’Donoghue (2015) writes,
“these acts of giving, receiving, taking and being taken; these opportunities to go places
conceptually, instinctually, intellectually, and affectively” (p. 107) are constant negotiations and
movements.
Paper has its own inclinations. It acts on and with the water, with the walls, the floors, the
door, and the children’s bodies. It becomes known by how it floats; how it gets slimy; how it
attaches under different conditions to walls, windows, and legs; how it feels; how it slips off;
what it does; how it moves. Paper becomes known as receptive, reactive, pliant, absorbent,
responsive to touch, to bending, folding, and crumpling. These movements may be subtle, yet
working with paper means one moves with the material in continuous motion, joining forces
with it (Ingold, 2013), responding to its inclinations. One thing leads to another, Ingold writes,
in “a gestural dance with a modulation of the material” (2013, p. 26). One never quite knows
where one will end up.
The studio is filled with newspaper strips. Some are in bins; some are stuffed into large,
freestanding clear acrylic tubes; and countless others lie scattered on the floor. Kale is
sitting on the floor near a shallow container of papier-mâché liquid. He picks up a single
paper strip and dips it into the liquid. The paper initially floats, then becomes receptive
to the liquid, and soon feels slippery to the touch. The longer it remains in the liquid the
slimier it becomes. As Kale’s fingers meet paper and paper meets liquid, something is
suggested. Kale tests out this alchemy as he drapes one strip over his leg and
momentarily pauses. It seems to feel pleasant to him. Impulsively he covers his leg with
more soaked strips in a fluid movement between fingers, paper strip, liquid, and leg. The
paper is slippery, cold, on his skin, and it soon draws other children and educators
around to watch what is happening. Before long, other hands dip the paper in the liquid,
pass the strips to Kale, and join in his experimentation.
Continuous Motion
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In thinking about making, it would be a mistake to think these movements are sequential or
continuous in a linear sense. Or that paper is played with, materials are explored, and through
a series of gestures and movements a goal is reached. Or that the process of working with a
material leads us from one state to another and ends when a child becomes a dragon, when an
object is made, or when a leg is covered. Instead, these movements are recursive, acting on
each other in a continuous exchange back and forth. They reverberate and continue long after
something is made.
An educator sweeps up at the end of the morning, and a few paper strips get caught in
the movement of the broom and escape from the bag. There is a look, a hesitation, and
the bag is overturned. Hundreds of strips join the few that escaped, and the children are
pulled into a paper-sweeping game.
Movement with paper is both rhythm and repetition—the doing and undoing—filling,
emptying, sweeping, covering, uncovering. We see a desire to keep things in motion. Not a
conscious desire per se. It is a desire that resembles life’s movements, as Deleuze (1997, para.
G2) explains: “Desire does not comprise any lack; neither is it a natural given”; “it is process, in
contrast with structure or genesis; it is affect, as opposed to feeling; it is ‘haecceity’
(individuality of a day, a season, a life)”; “it is event, as opposed to thing or person”; it is
“defined by zones of intensity, thresholds, gradients, flux.”
A large purple exercise ball is perched on an upturned stool, inviting connections of
paper strips and papier-mâché liquid. For weeks the children play with rhythms of
covering and uncovering. Strip by strip, paper is dipped in the liquid and the ball is
covered until its round surface resembles a paper moon. But it doesn’t stay this way.
Once covered, the moon is undone, paper kept in motion. Piece by piece, the strips are
pulled off until the ball is visible again and the sticky paper strips are marshaled for
other uses. Then one day there is a pause. The fire alarm rings. We are interrupted, and
finally the ball stays covered. The paper strips constrict as they dry, and a half-moon
shape is cut away from the purple ball, the moon becoming a paper bowl. It is carried
around, temporarily becoming a hat, a shelter, a carry-all, a boat, a tub, a hiding place.
It evolves as it responds to hands, air, temperature, feet. Paper strips separate, small tears
form as the bowl moves throughout the room, coming undone. This paper is still in the
process of becoming something else.
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Artist Andy Goldsworthy works with such movements in a similar way. He considers his
creations as transient or ephemeral. Goldsworthy (n.d.) says, “I want my art to be sensitive
and alert to changes in material, season and weather. Each work grows, stays, decays. Process
and decay are implicit. Transience in my work reflects what I find in nature” (para. 4). Just as
for Goldsworthy, for us working with paper was working through impermanence,
continuously in motion. We had to resist “perfection” and static renderings. Instead we became
participants with the intensities and flows of materials in motion.
Caught in the Currents
Kale and Grayson take armloads of paper strips from the studio table to play games of
shaking, throwing, crawling under the falling paper—arms outstretched as if to soar
with the paper taking flight. We amplify the children’s actions in response, echoing their
movements and exaggerating the game by bringing a fan to play along. Having noticed
how paper slips under the door into the hallway at the end of each day, we respond by
hanging paper strips from the ceiling, hoping they will catch the movement of the air
and trying to make these movements of paper and air more visible. When the children
come into the studio in the morning, they are greeted by a light breeze generated by a
floor fan. Narrow translucent wax paper strips hang from the ceiling, stirring with the
movements of bodies and the circulating breeze.
Whenever we encounter a material, it is a material in movement. Paper yellows and fades
over time, warps and curls with humidity, becomes more brittle, and shifts in the breeze or
with the movement of bodies in a room. Paper hanging from the ceiling falls down with the
drying of the tape that holds it in place, or with the slow weight of gravity. We work with
paper as active, agentic, and dynamic. We learn that “materials are always and already on
their ways to becoming something else” (Ingold, 2013; relying on Barad, 2013, p. 31).
In our studio, paper became caught up in the movements of the world, the movements of
the air, the currents of the lifeworld. We wanted to exaggerate and amplify these movements
by bringing in the fan, by working outside in the wind and on top of an outdoor vent. We
became interested in the energy of the material itself. Inspired by Goldsworthy’s art, we
attended to “the energy and space around” paper as much as “the energy and space within”
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paper.
Ingold (2013) reminds us that we are participants in a world of active materials: “The
conduct of thought goes along with, and continually answers to, the fluxes and flows of the
materials we work with” (n.p.). Paper started to “think in us” as we started to “think through”
it. In other words, we set up a “new” relation with the world, a relation of what Ingold calls
correspondence. In this new relation, we attempted to better respond with the world, rather
than accumulating tons of information about the world (Ingold, 2013). This correspondence
opened possibilities of being taken by surprise.
Surprise (Being Moved by the Materials)
Teachers and children have gathered outdoors around a large, rectangular raised cement
structure covered by a heavy grill. From somewhere deep inside the structure, a fan
generates a strong upward gust of air. We place the papier-mâché bowls we made a
couple of weeks ago (little ones, middle ones, huge ones) on top of the grill. The paper
bowls hover, glide, soar, and fly! Bodies move in concert with the flow of air and the
traveling bowls. Surprised by the movement of the bowls in the wind, Mira bends into
one little bowl’s line of flight as she sends it across the grill to the children on the other
side. “You have to move with it,” she says, her arms echoing gestures of releasing the
bowl and its floating action as it moves across the grill.
The littlest bowl is named Baby. “Baby! Come here, Baby!” Sophia sings with arms
outstretched while her fingers beckon. She calls out again: “Baby, come here! Come here,
Baby!” The bowl unexpectedly responds as it catches the flow of air and floats toward
her. “I got it!” she cries and holds it close in an embrace before it takes flight again on
the currents of the wind. Everything moves together in synchronicity: voices calling,
hands outstretched, air gusting, a child’s desire, the baby bowl, and all the bodies. Even
the wind rustling through the surrounding trees seems to be joining in.
We are surprised by how this encounter is taking shape as a slow dance. Bodies,
bowls, arms, paper strips, and wind move together, in and out. This collective experience
brings an unexplainable delight: the delight of being moved by materials.
What surprised us most was that after we learned to follow its movements, paper wove
itself into our lifeworlds. And when this happened, we were encouraged to dream with paper,
or, as Ingold says, to see things in the way paper lives in the world. Our practice somehow
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became what Davies (2014) refers to as “emergent listening,” opening itself up to “the
possibility of new ways of knowing and new ways of being” (p. 21) so that something new
and surprising can happen.
Movement Across
The collective experience of paper bowls flying across the vent presented other possibilities of
being with materials and with each other—not only for the children, but also for the educators.
Some time after the paper experience was over, Sylvia and some of the educators visited the
New Media Art Gallery in New Westminster, British Columbia, to see Karina SmiglaBobinski’s work, ADA, a visitor-animated interactive art-making machine
(http://www.smigla-bobinski.com/english/works/ADA/index.html). The artist had created a
huge helium-filled transparent spherical balloon with thick charcoal sticks protruding in even
intervals all around the circumference. It was enclosed and floating in a rectangular white
room, the surfaces of which had become densely marked by the black charcoal. One only had
to enter the room to see that something was happening. The most relevant questions were not
about ADA’s meaning or symbolic function, or what this installation was, but what it could do,
what could happen, and what we could do in the midst of it. Visitors could walk in through an
entryway and interact with ADA, so we went in and began to play with her. We could take
hold of the charcoal protrusions and play with her resistances, the weight or pressure of air
pushing against the desires of one’s arms to move this “machine” fast and make long strokes
on the walls, trying to get into corners and extend beyond the boundaries of the existing
marks. Or we could gently nudge the ball and move with its slow movements, batting back
and forth, hands softly pushing her into the wall, moving in concert with her placid gliding as
she floated out from the walls and drifted up toward the ceiling. We could work with or
against ADA’s own inclinations.
Being surrounded by the rich black lines and marks on the ceiling, walls, and floor, feeling
the movements of the ball as it bounced from surface to surface, being in the midst of it was a
moving experience: an emotional, bodied, tactile, sensory, felt experience. We felt delight in
the pleasure of the experience and a desire to move with it. The experience echoed what
O’Sullivan (2006) describes: that affect is not about an individual but a collective; it has more
to do with an experience than with representation. That is, the experience of being in the
charcoal-marked room, playing with and finding ourselves moving with ADA, and getting to
know some of ADA’s potentiality, like the experience of gathering around the outdoor vent
and being caught up in the play of paper, bodies, and wind, is the point of the work: finding
oneself moved by the experience. It can spill out, affect others, and offer new ways of being in
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the world (O’Sullivan, 2006).
While we were at the gallery experiencing ADA, we watched a man and two children enter
the room. The man waited at the door while his young children interacted with ADA. As they
ran to him with blackened hands and arms outstretched as if to greet him and draw him in, he
drew back several steps and extended his hands in a gesture of “stay back!” To stay back
affirms charcoal’s messiness, affirms a drawing and bouncing ball as child’s play, and
reconfirms the separation between the life and desires of a child and those of an adult.
O’Donoghue (2015) discusses this turn to experience in contemporary art. He describes how
artists who are committed to art production that is participa-tory, interactive, and
collaborative have conceptualized and pursued experience as an essential element of their
work, creating situations and putting conditions into play so that the artwork is the experience
or produces an experience, rather than being a representation or translation of an already
lived experience. Here O’Donoghue relies on Dewey (1916), who emphasizes the immediacy
of experience and the interconnected processes of “doing and undergoing” (p. 46). According
to Dewey, an artistic experience is a dynamic and fluid one of acting, responding, making,
considering, creating, experimenting, forming, and transforming. As a collective productive
participatory experience. There is a lively fullness of experience and affective, sensory, bodied,
holistic engagements.
Perhaps, we thought, our response to children might be about organizing experience to
produce joyful encounters, or, as O’Sullivan (2006) says, those which “increase our capacity to
act in the world” (p. 42). O’Donoghue (2015) refers to this role of a teacher as experienceproducers who create opportunities for dwelling in the world, for experiencing that which
“may not seem possible until lived” (pp. 105–106).
Paper in Its Final Move
Paper was the experience of it, the doing of paper, the moving with paper. As researchers, we
noticed how things move together, how the material experimentations became a
choreography of children, educators, bodies, materials, places, histories, stories intersecting,
interacting, influencing, and working together. There were rhythmic movements of doing and
undoing, pleasures of gathering and dispersing, composing and decomposing and of keeping
things in motion. We noticed how children looked for opportunities to take things apart, how
they intervened in their own work to undo, loosen, and take apart so they could keep the
work going. We noticed rhythms of pause and engagement, these pauses a pivot. These forces,
flows, and movements are akin to Tim Ingold’s (2013) description of improvisation: a
rhythmic quality of working with the ways of the world. There was never iteration, a
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repetition or re-presentation of the world, but itineration as everyone and everything joined
with the forces and flows of the world.
As paper moves through time and with the world, it encounters other materials.
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