Excavating Fossilized Fraggles and Other Creations

Earlier this week, I remodeled my daughter’s art gallery. See, for more than two years, one wall of my kitchen has displayed her art. Two long lines of cord ran the length of the wall over the kitchen table, supported by metal hooks spaced evenly about two feet apart. Clothespins held her artwork in place on the cords. Whenever she added something new, we’d just place it over one of the old pictures.

The kitchen gallery space featured comic strips, watercolors, sketches, school projects, and poetry. My girl produces a lot of creative output, and the gallery was always a nice conversation piece with visitors. Plus, it’s important to give kids a place to dedicated to their creations.

But over time, the wall felt too cluttered, especially since it overlooked our kitchen table. Plus, the eclectic rainbow of artwork overwhelmed  the kitchen’s orange them.

Recently, my daughter brought home this brilliant autumn forest painting from her after-school art club. It featured long skinny tree trunks and splashes of crisp fall colors – especially my kitchen’s trademark orange. So, I decided to frame it along with some of her other orange-prominent works and give them a permanent spot in the kitchen. My favorite of her orange collection is a marker drawing of Mickey Mouse taking a pee.

So, to make a long story short (too late), I moved her gallery into the hallway.

This time, I made some improvements. Instead of cord, I used thick metal wire. This looks more professional, somehow. Instead of one long wall, the new gallery is broken into three different sections on two separate walls. I also placed the gallery space lower on the walls, so that she could take ownership over what’s displayed. Finally, I made sure she had a tray to archive older works replaced by newer ones. Hopefully, that’ll keep the gallery from getting too cluttered.

The best part of moving the gallery was going through her old creations. I felt like an archaeologist at a dig site, except instead of excavating dirt to find bones, I was digging through art to discovery memories – like the time we painted out fingertips and used our fingerprints to make the bodies of characters from the old Fraggle Rock t.v. show.

Another favorite was her drawing of two superheroes she created: Miss Fart and her piggy sidekick Tea-Ball. It read, “Fun Fact: Miss Fart works out every day except Tuesday and Thursday! Fun Fact: Tea-Ball rides on a flying top!” I also adored this poem:

I love rain

springkl

springkl

springkl

if you whar a raincoat, itl

ringkl

ringkl

ringkl

Reliving the memories was great, but more touching was seeing the course of her development. Going through almost three years’ worth of creations was like a slow-moving flip-book. I could see how her drawings and words have grown. All her characters used to have these enormous head-sized hands with crazy-long fingers. Her phonetically-spelled words used to stand on wobbly newborn Bambi legs and stagger all over the page. It was a joy to see how her creations have matured.

I saved some and recycled others. You can’t keep everything.

So, now I’ve got this stack of older works. For the moment, I’ll file them away. At some point, I’d like to do something creative and interesting with them, though. I want to experience her growth again, but it’d be nice not to have to dig.