….personally I love collage but many people don’t consider it an art form

Yesterday I went to a workshop put on by the art consultants in our board and the topic was Collage. It wasn’t a huge class but there were about 15 teachers there from the elementary panel. We all taught different grade levels but we came with the same goal in mind and that was how to teach the art of collage to our students.

Our instructor took the group down a hallway to observe some examples of collage that had been done by the students at that school. The message that we took away was that collage is not suppose to be a bunch of pictures pasted randomly onto paper. I’m afraid that some of my grade five students are guilty of this very thing and even though we talked about foreground, middle ground and background many didn’t quite grasp how to apply that to their collage assignment.

One idea or school of thought behind collage is that the piece should tell a story. Some of my students were quite comfortable talking about their art but others couldn’t really come up with much of a story. The group at the workshop was given 2 assignments to complete in the hour and a half that we had and this included the lesson and the discussions that followed each assignment. For the first assignment we were asked to choose a post card from the table and then find ‘one’ picture that we could add to the card to create a new piece of art. The new addition was to blend in with the piece and look like it belonged there. Of course I missed the part about using only one picture but a few others did as well. Despite that the things that people came up with were very interesting and unfortunately these first pieces were scooped up very quickly and I didn’t get a chance to take photos.

The second assignment involved choosing an image that had been removed from a discarded art book. The paper is nice and heavy and works well for gluing collage papers onto it. Then we were instructed to pick 2 or 3 different colours of paper to add to the image and finally we had to find some pictures from magazines to add to the image. One of the hardest parts was deciding on which image to choose.

We only had 10 minutes to complete the first assignment and for the second assignment we were given about 40 minutes. It was a lot of fun and we were given some useful tips along the way that we can pass on to our students. One tip is ‘don’t let students glue anything down until they’ve conferenced with the teacher’. Good advice.

When all the pieces were done or at least close to being finished we had an opportunity to tell ‘our story’. I won’t discuss the stories here but maybe you can figure out for yourself what some of these stories are. My contribution is the last piece in the gallery with the netting across the woman’s face.