Learning about BC through art

The ArtStarts gallery is a welcoming little building nestled in the heart of downtown Vancouver. The gallery feature artwork created by kindergarten to grade 12 students from across BC. The students worked with professional artists in their classrooms, learning not only artistic techniques, but also using the arts as a way to explore different studies, such as the environment, Aboriginal peoples history and sustainability.

For example, one of the pieces on display in the gallery oversaw fourth and fifth graders from Okanagan Landing School on a trip out to their native forests to learn about invasive / non-invasive species of plants, pollinators, and birds, and their effects on the environment; in turn, the students sewed together two impressive wall to ceiling quilts with hand crafted cut outs of plants, pollinators, and birds that were separated to show which were invasive and non-invasive.

This project, with additions from other schools in BC, has developed into the gallery’s current exhibition, intelligently named Common Ground. The exhibition is showcasing the works of students from all over BC, who have explored their respective natural ecosystems, or culture and have channeled their new found knowledge into an art piece — a “common ground.” The most unique art pieces include a life size pollinator house — made by sixth and seventh graders from Strathcona Elementary in Vancouver — and hand woven, Aboriginal-inspired, miniature pouches — made by first to sixth graders from Manoah Steeves Elementary in Squamish.

Let us not forget, though, the form of art more commonly associated with galleries: paintings. While pollinator houses, miniature pouches, and enormous quilts sound unique on their own, they are art pieces that require more physical work rather than a dedicated attention to detail. And it is a fact renounced the world over, that anyone can splat colours on a canvas, but it is the artist who paints; for this, the paintings hung in the gallery are from thinkers and engineers of an older age and understanding.

Biology and art students from Mount Sentinel Secondary in South Slocan, are the focus of a collagraph printmaking type of painting piece. These students, who explored the Slocan river with the help and instructions of a field guide, were taught at first the techniques of field mapping and note taking and later, were taught to transform their findings onto a foam plate — placing actual flowers along with etched symbols, sealing the plates and dying them in an ink to make prints on paper of the original template.

To make it a more ‘common ground’ for all people to enjoy, the gallery’s entrance welcomes you with a literal display of the ground: soil jars with water, collected from all over BC, that show the dynamic breakup of water, clay, silt, and sand common to all us BC folk. The combination of art, culture, and nature is evidently strong in the exhibition’s message, and resonates effectively between the walls of the gallery. The exhibition is quick to draw an avid nature lover and art lover alike into its displays, which constitute not specifically of either content — nature or art — but, represent a perfect blend of both. More metaphorically, they represent a ‘common ground,’ an abstractness present in the human makeup of every individual: the calm balance of our natural physique and our artful intellect.

The Common Ground exhibition is running until March 2016, free of cost, at the ArtStarts gallery, located at 808 Richards Street, Vancouver. For more information, you can visit the gallery’s website at www.artstarts.com/exhibitions/commonground.