Fair Play

Paddles made from wood, foam, rug tufting, glass, crochet, thumbtacks;  nets made from chain link, bricks and rope.

Making is a way that I play with and explore the world around me. It’s a space where I can ask or answer questions, effect my physical and intellectual world, and follow curiosities. When I have the opportunity for un/less-structured studio time (especially while glue sets or paint dries), a new tool or process to wrap my hands around, or the occasional residency period I work on realizing usable paddles from the diagrams. I seek ways to test them out– local outdoor tables, between floor and wall, the occasional cookout, lobbing balls down our hallway for our beloved cat, Patina, to chase… I ask What did I expect this to actually be like? What have I learned from doing it?

I made samples, planned our lessons, and prepped our stock. We spent two class periods making our parts– paddles and retractable nets– followed by a class period we would spend playing/testing our new creations. Our limited tool kit and developing dexterity posed some challenges for our young craftspeople. At times we felt great disappointment about how fair our curves were cut or how well shaped or smooth our handles were and spent a portion of our time together exploring these differences in what we had created, what our expectations were. We had conversations about adaptation, how to incorporate, accentuate, and even celebrate the features that made each paddle different. Though our paddles had some variation, we had a great deal of fun playing across our work tables on that last day of class just the same.

TEDRadioHour released an episode called Press Play in March of 2015, right around when I was teaching the first versions of the paddle-making project. A couple of months later (a guess related to the early occurrences of notes and sketches) I came across the episode and was introduced to the idea of building empathy through play (italicized here because I use this phrase often, but certainly did not originate it and am struggling to find the source of this concept. Please contact me if you find it.) My interests in the concept of distraction, creativity, and flow states intersect with play. Other work I have done has touched on play and related topics, and I often describe working in the studio or problem solving in the shop as a version of play (depending on deadlines or other time demands).

In preparation for each coming year I try to update my lesson documentation. While thinking about my goals for the paddle making lesson I kept coming back to how particularly special the conversations I had with my first and second graders felt. Many of our classroom projects focused on the acquisition of technical skills like learning to measure and mark, using different tools safely/effectively, planning and executing a process as well as creative practices like story telling with our creations and engaging in imaginative play to explore how an object might have been designed. I returned to the episode and looked up the paper referenced ( Social Stress Elicits Emotional Contagion of Pain in Mouse and Human Strangers by L. J. Martin, G. Hathaway, D. J. Levitin, J. S. Mogil) and other related articles. Why don’t we expand the way we are engaging with play in this project? I wondered. I began forming new goals, bringing prompts to consider the object as it is and imagine more ways of being (playing with the form) followed by reflection on the experience to the center of the project. This led to doodles of absurd paddles (soft materials; melting; breakable; .5x, 2x, 3x, 6x scaling across one or more axes…) filling the edges of notes and pages in sketchbooks spanning years.

Early in this practice, I considered the different iterations and what I felt the collection might mean. I see each element as both being and representing difference but have always intentionally avoided creating 1:1 relationships between any characteristic or feature and any particular identity. We each experience the many parts of ourselves in such deeply personal and individualized ways and I have always wanted the way one might relate to any of these pieces to be as expansive as possible. And, of course, it would be wildly inappropriate to create analogies using identities I don’t inhabit, or to try to make broad statements about any I do.

Since those early lessons I have offered similar workshops to people of a much wider range of ages, each iteration enriching how I think about teaching, making objects, and engaging in craft practices. New questions arise with each opportunity to share this work in a learning environment informing future versions, and also how I reflect on earlier ones. This project, perhaps more than any other in my portfolio, demonstrates the energy interwoven (entwinded?) through both. Through the many iterations of this work- creating advantages or deficits through changing the form, questioning expectations of what it means for something to function, the greatest lesson has been that it’s all made up so while we can’t change everything, we can play with and change many things and perhaps become more understanding along the way.