“It looks like a show in there.”

The children are always excited to have Emily visit, and on Wednesday, she accompanied us to the sculpture park, beginning with Two Big Black Hearts, by Jim Dine.

Studio Purple’s blog post, “The Moments In Between,” speaks of the children’s interest in “the ordinary or in-between moments.” This resonates throughout the school: the spaces in between sculptures are as worthy of exploration as the sculptures themselves.

A walk in the sculpture park often begins with a destination: “We’re going to the Hearts,” and the children run to the hearts and investigate them. But a hill nearby, and a fence alongside it, and sticks there, pull them away from the sculpture. It is an opportunity to move, to be chased, to see how far the sticks reach. The hills at Lincoln (the big tube sculpture) and in the area around Humming, consistently draw children to them, to connect with each other.

It is likely that one cannot exist without the other: more verbal, contained investigations must be followed by larger movements before bodies can, again, slow down. 

So we started at the hearts, then, after some running on the hill by the fence, headed to the beautifully collapsing Big, With Rift, and ran around it, occasionally stopping to wonder about a sign or even if it was a sculpture at all – and then we climbed back up to Environmental Impact Statement. There, the children noticed holes in the sculpture, and put their fingers in and tried to look inside. Travers said, It’s like a show in there.  Saige commented, It looks like a rock.  Sam notice the metal tree trunk and said, A stick sculpture.