Play, play, play! is a collaborative project with the community at the Neighborhood Art Center. I approached this project through an artist and early childhood educator lens. While I was interested in collage through textiles, the focus was on process based art making and exploration through material in three phases of play.

Phase 1: I provided scraps of fabric as collage material for the students, ages ranging from 2-10, to apply to paper or fabric creating colorful collages that plays with color, shape, and form.

Phase 2: I made large three dimensional sculptures that mimicked the scrapes of fabric they chose in their art works and blew them up in scale. I focused on using a variety of types of fabrics, shapes, and weight of the sculptures. The intentionality of that variation comes from my knowledge as an early childhood educator. Children, especially young children, should be exposed to a variety of textures and sensories. In this, children can further develop their understanding of the world around them. It helps strengthens both gross and fine motor skills while also gives them an opportunities for language development as they practice communicate the different way objects feel.

Phase 3: While the children engaged with the objects, I documentated the way they played and interacted. Taking the work back to a two dimensional space in an image of the way they collaged the objects using their whole bodies, but in a similar way to their own collage they made at the beginning.