Children's Political and Aesthetic Enactment: Learning from Frequencies, a Global Archive of School Student Canvases

Abstract

Frequencies is a long-term international project led by Turner-prize-winning artist Oscar Murillo that has enabled children to make their marks on canvases fixed to desks in classrooms across the world. Since 2013, students in 350 schools in 30 countries have participated, producing over 40,000 canvases. Undirected mark-making can provide a new lens for reflection that disrupts dominant patterns of knowledge construction. How children expressed their being whilst at school was explored through a research study that examined a sample of the canvases from 12 varying geographical and cultural contexts. The stages of analysis challenged developmentalist conceptualisation of children’s art as the expression of evolving self-awareness and ignorant of subject matter, with little value in itself. Instead, I contend that children’s representations of their surroundings, and the universality of scribbled symbols, demonstrate a sophisticated sense of human symbiosis with the world. Images of celebration, of war, and belief, enabled children to express communicative competences and emotional capabilities that they are not supposed to have at school, revealing their self-awareness and understanding of their selves in relation to the perceived world around them. There is further tension between the natural and manufactured, through representation of the colonisation of minority world ideas, with brands and media appropriations littered throughout the canvases. And yet there is hope as children resist the heteronomy evoked by school, by changing the rules of child art towards political and aesthetic enactment that suggests the ‘product’ of their endeavours is just as important as the mark making process itself.