Words & Photos from Jasper D.
We began today’s long-awaited expedition day by boarding a school bus and heading down to Mary Lake Nature Sanctuary, where we spent the day writing, collaging, and drawing! Mary Lake Nature Sanctuary is a 67 acre protected forest, located in the Highlands District, about a thirty minute drive from campus. Their goal is to preserve the ecosystems and protect the wildlife found in the environment. On the property are plenty of hiking trails as well as an indoor space situated on a beautiful frozen lake where we spent the majority of our time!
We started off the day by sketching a variety of different objects including antique locks, seashells, glass bottles, acorns, rocks, etc. Michelle, a local artist, led us through an activity that helped us view the objects in a different way, from a different perspective. She put a glass bottle on the table, covered it with a cloth, and then pulled out a hammer. We were all quite shocked when she smashed the bottle into hundreds of tiny pieces! She then explained how there isn’t just one way of looking at something and that a great, successful artist can view things from multiple perspectives. She handed out a variety of different beautiful papers, with different textures and patterns, pens and pencils, scissors and glue. And we began my favourite part, the collaging process!! We cut up our drawings, old dictionary pages, the colourful paper and pasted them on our collages. The project was quite open, which allowed for everyone to be very creative, resulting in a bunch of beautiful and unique pieces!
For the writing portion of our cohort session, Mr. Dewar led us through several five minute writing prompts about a chosen object. Some of the objects my peers chose include: a shoe, a lock, bottles, a rock and many more! We are planning on creating and polishing a poem based on the writing prompts. After, we had a chance to share our work from last expedition day. We sat around in a circle and everyone had an opportunity to share one of the poems they had written. It was really great and inspiring listening to everyone’s pieces.
We all can’t wait for our next Expedition day!