A Palette of Place: Children, Co-Creation with Colour and Rethinking Pedagogical Ethics in the Making of Art

What does colour do in the process of building place relations? As a species we have a long complicated history with colour, informing our primal side of danger, food, community and cultural meaning. In building a palette of place with natural, foraged materials questions arise. What are the artistic, ethico-ontological implications of claiming a work when it was co-created? How can an artist curb the ego and habits of human-superiority when we recognize only the human creator? How does a simple act of signing a work become a colonizing act of aggression? Why is it important to interrogate and interrupt this habit?

Recognizing the power of language and the habits of creating within a community of kin convey strong messages for young children. As soon as children can write their names, they are encouraged to claim their artistic works in acts of propriety ownership. This simple task fuels the individuality of me and mine and casts aside the complicated, collective, others found in the space of attention instead of intention (Ranganath, 2024). This paper is an effort to think with the intimate colours of place relations, a palette of place (Hennessy, 2022) as a process of making more-than-human relations. In building community with place colour stops being something, an object, instead becoming the intimacy of a sensory-intellectual understanding of what colour does (Finlay, 2007). This move from colour as feature, adjective and descriptor to a presence, and mediated medium of a kinscape (Vowel, 2022) in relations is a move I understand as building a palette of place.

How does this collaborative approach to “signing” and “dating” art become an ethical pedagogy of a palette of place? How does this diminish habits of othering nature in favour of a shared world change pedagogical work with young children in precarious planet times?