Habla Handbook: Junkyard Portraits

8/8/2019 Habla Handbook: Junkyard Portraits

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JunkyardPortraitsby Karla Hernando and Kur t Woo t ton

HABLA BEST PRACTICE HANDBOOK 2010visual arts


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HABLA BEST PRACTICE HANDBOOK 2010

JunkyardPortraits

Introduction by Kurt Wootton

Ive always been ascinated by the possibilities

o sel-portraits (auto retratos in Spanish).

To me they seem to be the natural translation

to the eld o visual art o Brazilian educator

Paulo Freires work. Paulo Freire writes, the

reading and writing o words comes by way

o reading the world. In order to develop our

capabilities to read and write, we need to nd

the words to describe ourselves and the worldaround us. In Freires view language is not

something that is static, sitting in pages o

books to be analyzed; it is something that is

alive. When we harness the power o langua-

ge we begin to create a narrative o ourselves

in the world. Its interesting to me that Obama

wrote his biography beore he ran or political

oce. In Dreams from My Father, he seems to

be discovering his voice through the wordshe put on the page, and, in a sense, creating

himsel through his own narrative.

The sel-portrait is the visual equivalent o the

biography. Through sel-portraits students

reect on who they are and urther invent

who they are by presenting an image o them-

selves to the world. Because weve seen many

The Habla Summer Lab School brings

together kids, teaching artists, and educators

rom around the world. For our weeks every

summer in Mrida, Mexico, artists and

educators design and pilot new practices in

education conceived collaboratively by theinternational teaching team. This practice

Junkyard Portraits was developed by

Mrida teaching artist Karla Hernando Flores,

the coordinator or Hablas lab school, and

Sarabeth Berk, a teaching artist rom the

United States and the coordinator or the

education programs at the Anderson Ranch

Arts Center in Aspen, Colorado.

artists teach sel-portraiture to students o

every age, when Karla Hernando and Sarabe-

th Berk introduced this multi-layered process

o creating sel-portraits involving sculpture,

photography, and text, we knew we had a

new best-practice to document and share.


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The Voice of the Teaching Artist: Karla

Sarabeth Berk, a teaching artist rom the

United States, and I collaborated to teach

Hablas summer lab school or local and

international kids. Our concept or the sum-

mer was Opening Spaces. Since the summerschool was our weeks we subdivided this

larger theme into our smaller ones: personal

spaces, group and amily spaces, community

spaces, and mythic spaces. Parallel to our lab

school, Habla was hosting a teacher institute

around the theme o Cabinets o Wonder, so

we had this in mind as well when we began to

conceive o the arts experience in our clas-

sroom. We knew that sel-portraiture is oten

used in classrooms, but we wanted to reinvent

it, to give it new lie. We believed that kids

could approach themselves as i they were

cabinets o wonders. We rst imagined how

the nal art objects would look. At rst wehad the idea that they could create ull repre-

sentations o themselves with paper-mache.

This idea developed into using ound objects

rom the community. We decided to nd

our objects in a junkyard that we discovered

outside the city o Mrida. While we were at

the junkyard, it started to rain, but we didnt

care. We kept walking around the yard loo-

king or objects and putting them in our car.

I ound mysel eeling like a little girl again,

imagining what my own sculpture would look

like with all the objects. I ound mysel picking

up round things, and unconsciously Sarabeth

was picking up larger objects, objects that hadsquare shapes. That was important or us both

as artists and teachers. We were imagining

the possibilities or creating our own work. We

knew that i we could inspire the same eeling

in the kids, it would be a wonderul process.

We believed that kids could approach them-

selves as i they were cabinets o wonders.


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Procedure

1 Visiting the junkyard.There is oten a scar-

city o art materials in small towns around

Mexico. Teaching artists weve met oten

nd other ways to collect and use oundmaterials. This eclectic gathering o diverse

materials not only saves money but is eco-

logical as well. The materials are recycled

through the art- making process. Junk

becomes a beautiul sculpture in mom and

dads home! With this impulse in mind Kar-

la and Sarabeth scoured a junkyard looking

or scraps o metal, gears, springs, rods, and

anything else that looked interesting. Theybrought this metal back to Habla in boxes

and stored it.

2. Traditional Self Portraits. To introduce

the idea o portraiture, the teachers asked

the students to begin with a traditional

portrait wherein each student, only using a

pencil, drew a portrait o another student.

Then the subjects o the portraits received

their portraits rom their partners as a git

o art. They then used pastels to add color

to their own portraits thus creating a back-

and-orth interpretive movement between

the two artists and between the two

subjects.

3. Recreating the Junkyard.The teachers

scattered all the objects rom the junkyard

throughout the gardens at Habla.


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Karla explains, We wanted the students to

go on a hunt or objects. We wanted them

to realize they were selecting their objects,

so we didnt want them neatly organized.

We wanted to recreate the eeling o n-

ding them or the rst time in a junkyard.

The students brought them all back to a

common area on the sidewalk, and then as

a class organized them into categories that

they determined.

4. An Eclectic Design Process.The students

then selected the objects they wanted to

use to make a sel-portrait o their whole

body (not thinking about the ace and head

at this time). Some students ound boxes

and ended up not only working with the

outside o the body but the inside as well,

nding organs, the stomach, the heart, and

including it as part o their portrait. They

assembled their pieces in the orm o their

sel-portrait on the sidewalk.

5. Joining.The teachers had several tools

available (a drill used under close supervi-

sion, wire, and string) or the students to

assemble their junkyard portraits.

While some students were working with the

tools, the teachers had the rest o the

students drawing their junkyard portraits.

This allowed the teachers to work with

smaller groups working with the tools

rather than the entire class at one time. The

students had to wrestle with ways to make

their sculptures stand up. Karla explained,

This was very important or us, or the

students to gure out how to solve that

problem, to put them together in a way so

they would stand.

6. Clay faces. Since the junkyard portraits

lacked heads, the teachers decided to have

the students make the heads out o clay.

Karla explains, We didnt have mirrors, so

instead we asked the students to eel their

own aces, to sense with their hands what

their eatures and head elt like, where the

curves and indentations are, and to recreate

themselves in the clay.

7. Photography.The teachers gave the

students digital cameras and the students

put the clay heads and the mechanized bo-dies together and then took photographs o

their works o art. They also posed with their

sculptures and took duel sel-portraits o

themselves and their junkyard creations.


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8. Description of Sculpture. Karla and

Sarabeth then asked the students to look at

their sculptures as characters, separate rom

themselves. The students wrote

descriptions o their characters: what it

looks like, what its personality is like, where

it lives, what it does. In this sense they were

stepping outside o themselves and

writing about who they are rom a

completely diferent perspective. This

wasnt a process o reection, because the

students werent reecting on themselves

or seeing their own reections. It was more

o a reractive process. Reraction implies

they are seeing a version o themselves

transormed into something else, with

elements o the original. Light reracts when

it passes through an object at an angle and

comes out diferently than when it went in.

The students conceptions o themselves

morphed when they used various materials

to recreate themselves. Standing back rom

their objects, they viewed something that

was both o them (having the original

elements o who they are) but with

elements o something that is completely

strange. Karla explains, We elt it was

important or them to stand back rom their

creations and see it as both other and o

themselves.


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Habla is an educational center and lab school based in Mrida,Yucatn, Mxico,

dedicated to ostering school environments that promote the success o all

students rom multiple cultural backgrounds. For teachers, artists, and school

leaders, Habla ofers: cultural and language experiences, teacher institutes,

and an annual international educational orum.

www.habla.org
http://www.habla.org/http://www.habla.org/

Habla Handbook: Junkyard Portraits

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