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JunkyardPortraitsby Karla Hernando and Kur t Woo t ton
HABLA BEST PRACTICE HANDBOOK 2010visual arts
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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/