Skip To Main Content

Close trigger

ELC Inquiry Questions

Q: How did the artist make the dots in her artwork?

 

The ELC Kindergarten students became interested in using dots in their artwork after reading "The Dot" by Peter H Reynolds.
 

While they were exploring dots, one of the students got particularly inspired by Yayoi Kusama and two of her artworks, “Balloon Sculptures” and “Obliteration Room”. The student shared his interest and knowledge with his friends and invited them to create their own balloon art. They had great fun painting many balloons and popping some of them over the next few days. Some of them spent more time studying the photograph of “Balloon Sculptures” and tried to paint circular dots.

This lead them to explore more of Kusama's art, and they wondered how the dots in “Obliteration Room” were created. They came up with several theories and experimented with each of these techniques; splatter painting, feet painting, pens, stamping and stickers.

After the experiment, they agreed that the artist used either stickers or dabber pens, but one of the students pointed out that in the “Obliteration Room” the dots are all over the walls but they had not tried any of their experiments on walls.

So they found a space in the school to put two large pieces of paper on the wall and asked the students and teachers from across the school to help their experiment by putting dots using dabbers and stickers. They examined the result carefully and concluded that is it stickers that were used in Obliteration Room.

Students then decided to create their own Obliteration Room. They explored the school with tape measures and rulers and found the perfect space to build a white room with white furniture. With lots of help from other people in school and after lots of hard work painting the stool and shelf white, their Obliteration Room - an exhibition showing their experiment was finally ready and open for visitors to come in and add stickers on the walls.

The Kindergarten students were excited to see the different ways people had chosen to use the stickers. The Obliteration room stayed open for three weeks and the whole school contributed in creating the art that was started initially from an inspiration by one of the Kindergarten students!

AND....their learning journey was even made into a book!

(Read the book HERE!)