Charles Wright Academy's Upper School visual arts teacher recently opened an interactive art exhibit, “Play Shapes,” at the Children’s Museum of Tacoma in Studio B. Running through November, the installation invites kids to explore patterns and shapes through multimedia projects using durable wooden stencils. Hutcheson shares his thought process behind creating the exhibit and his hopes for inspiring young artists. You can see more of his work at his blog, Hutchwork.
I was inspired to work with the Children’s Museum of Tacoma by two goals:
1) As an art and design educator, I want to be able to show my students that I’m a practicing artist.
2) I wanted to challenge myself to break free of my comfort zone and work with younger children.
As an art student, I always admired my teachers who actively worked to exhibit their work and participate in the greater creative community. When I became a teacher, I set that as a continual goal for myself. The pursuit of showing my work and applying for commissions has given me a far greater ability to empathize with my students and be more thoughtful about the work I challenge them to complete.
Often I ask my students to push themselves outside of their comfort zones and to take a risk with their work. Working with the Children’s Museum of Tacoma has really pushed me and forced me to reconsider the context of a project. Creating a lesson plan for students to explore in a classroom is far different from the open play setting of the museum. In the classroom, I have far more control over each step of a process, and I’m constantly present to lend a hand. For the museum I had to thoughtfully design a set of tools that could lead to a variety of playful explorations that didn’t require my presence and featured little to no instructions.
My installation consists of a large set of laser-cut wooden stencils ranging from basic shapes to patterns to letters to numbers. I hope that visitors will use these simple shapes, patterns, and characters to build more dynamic images and scenes. The great thing about these stencils is that they are quite versatile in the media they can be used with, from watercolors and spray paint to crayons and markers. We’ve even set up an overhead projector in the studio space to project these stencils onto large paper, allowing visitors to go big with their creations. I very much look forward to visiting the space with my own daughter to see how many different ways people have found to use the stencils.