The Body Is a Home

Kids with heart. Photo by Lynn Susholtz

Body as Home and Home as Body. Over a series of workshops at Monarch School, I worked with the Therapeutic Arts teachers and a group of middle school students to talk and draw bodies, movement and the idea of home. What does it mean when we say that the body is a home - there are many responses to this question. When do we feel most at home in our bodies? Students painted their silhouettes, wrote about their experiences and created movement about how they felt in their bodies. These ideas and conversations resulted in 2 paper installations at Art Produce. A human heart hangs in the gallery and words by the students spill out of it on to the walls. Heart as metaphor is my way of talking about children as the heart of society and the gallery as the heart of a community.

This activity was supported in part by the Artists Activating Communities program of the California Arts Council, a state agency. Learn more at www.arts.ca.gov.

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This project was rich with questions and no easy answers. We probed and we gathered and we listened as various voices opened windows of conversation.