As a student teacher years ago in a small farm community in Iowa, I watched the children in my kindergarten art class busily working on drawings of a favorite place. Some children covered their paper with looping lines of color. Still others began outlining shapes as they pushed their crayons purposefully across the surface. Near the end of the horseshoe of tables, a small, dark-haired boy worked with intensity, pressing down with his red, yellow, black, and purple crayons. A dark, conical form began to fill most of his page. Red and yellow flame-like shapes shot toward the top of the paper. Balls of red and yellow and black and cloud-like forms filled the rest of the space. He was eager to share his drawing. "This is a volcano," he said excitedly, "It's Kilauea!" "My daddy's name is Kilauea," he said, as if to explain. "He is in California. We're moving there soon, too!"
This incident has remained in my memory as a moment of special value; for the little boy and his volcano also furnished an example of the interlocking nature of art, narrative, and place in the life of a young child. This relationship of narrative, place, and individual is especially important, for it serves as a grounding for a great deal of artmaking in many cultures and diverse circumstances. The following is an attempt to discover how the relationship came about or, at least, how it might work, and what it means for artists of all ages.
In this article I describe two means of relating to space. One emphasizes the relationship of the individual to place and the other describes the interplay of place and group narrative. In the conclusion, I indicate what is important about grounding inquiry and artmaking in the local environment for students of all ages. Out of an immediate engagement with place and narrative, students, as well as teachers, will be able to directly experience their own "community as the arena for the creative expression of personal encounters with one's environment, one's web of life" (London, 1994, p. 4), and to create meaningful, authentic art that is spun out of its vigorous substance.
INDIVIDUAL AND PLACE
Familiar places, home places, are as varied and rich as the number of people in the world itself. The sense of "rightness" of each person's home place, the result of years of experience in a location, can be seen in the almost universal nostalgia and longing of people forced by life circumstances to move away from home to set up housekeeping elsewhere. Repeatedly, people return to, or elaborate, the place they call home, in stories, art, and other aesthetic arrangements, decorating, planting, elaborating their own personal place's beauty, telling and retelling its history.
An example of a familiar place set apart and marked off by a visionary inhabitant can be found in rural North Carolina where a white, asbestosshingled house sits close to the road, just as the rough surface bends to continue its way west toward the mountains. A front porch, nearly hidden by old, shaggy spiraea bushes, covers the front of the modest dwelling. To the left of the porch, steps descend to the rutted gravel and grass driveway, ending at the sagging doors of a wooden garage that takes up the left side of the small square of grass behind the house. This remaining space, tucked below a raised railroad bed along its rear edge, includes a pole and wire clothes line, an apple tree, and a flower bed. A dead tree stands in the middle of the small space, branches carefully lopped to three or four feet in length, bark gone, a large glass bottle or jar placed over the end of each cut limb (see Figure 1). The glass glints in the sunlight, turning the tree into a monument, a glittering shape that sets off the tiny house and garden from other dwellings along the road.
At the same time that it marks and beautifies, this glass-decked tree protects the house from evil, for it is a bottle-tree, a trap to catch and hold evil inside each of its upside-down containers. The creator of this glass and wood construction achieved two distinct outcomes at once, since the bottle-tree not only defines space for the house, but it also protects it and its occupants from harm. In this way, a dead tree is brought to life to mark off the familiar place from the surrounding overgrown ditches and scattered neighbors and to protect it by snatching ill-winds as they blow past .
Another example of the importance of a familiar place can be found in the art of Charles Burchfield. His vigorous watercolors provide images of the early 20th-century small town world of Salem, Ohio, his boyhood home; at the same time they describe his emotional responses to both its constructed and natural environment. Throughout his life he returned repeatedly to the many paintings he had completed as a young man in Salem, finally finishing them years later in Gardenville, New York. In order to carry out his intense vision, he added strips of paper to these early paintings, enlarging them, scraping, repainting, layering, and building up an opaque surface that illustrates in his own visual vocabulary the often brooding wonder of the visible world now residing only in his memory and imagination (Adams, 1997; Baigell, 1976). Gardenville, where Burchfield spent most of his adult life, never provided the same intense visual landscape as Salem; nonetheless, his later paintings of Salem, completed in Gardenville, became all the more vivid through his memory and imagination. Seasons overlap in these paintings, sounds of insects and bells take visible forms, and the wind of a storm hooks across the roof of a house as Burchfield portrays his own narrative intimacy with the streets, fields, houses, and gardens of his former home (Baigell, 1976).
Finally, Gardenville itself began to display its own visual charm in Burchfield s art, for he wrote, years later, " I don't believe there are many more banal and flat places than this village [Gardenville] ... And yet somehow if you live in a place for a certain length of time, things and places begin to belong to you" (Adams, 1997, p. 68). This is significant, for the familiar, the daily world-ordinary, or even, at first glance, unappealing-can become more engaging by the luster of immediacy, imagination, and intimacy. Burchfield's art of that "banal and flat" place, exemplified by the painting of his front yard, pine tree, and one lone leaf in deep snow completed in 1960, provides a case in point; for this unremarkable front garden is transformed into a mysterious clearing, somewhere on the edge of the enchanted northern woods that figured so importantly in Burchfield's imagination (Adams, 1997; Baigell, 1976).
Just as Burchfield remarked on the landscape of Salem, his boyhood home, or portrayed his engagement with the visual world near Buffalo, New York, the bottle tree also marks and defines its space, scooping evil out of the air as elegantly as Burchfield's snow brings enchantment to a suburban street (Adams, 1997) . Transcendence is present in both these cases, for the literal world falls away; illumination appears to both painter and bottle-tree maker as they move into a world of meaning and personal narrative beyond the confines of small town life with the force and vision of their creations.
These examples could be followed by endless other descriptions of aesthetic, narrative and imaginative responses that memorialize and elaborate a familiar important place for people everywhere. No matter what the response, each gives evidence of wellworn memories and intimate narratives grounded in particularities of each location. They include: alfombras, or carpets of flower petals and other natural materials, that cover the streets of many communities in Guatemala during Holy Week; fanciful rock and glass constructions dotting landscapes in many parts of the world (see Figure 2); and gardens in various shapes and patterns. All these elaborate and celebrate the familiar, the roll of the land, the shape of the sky, the wellknown sounds of birds, animals, and human life. The little boy and his volcano fit here too, for the image of Kilauea is at once place, narrative, parent, and future reunion: an illustration and story of the importance of the child's family and father that at the same time honors his family's place of origin.
Place can also be linked with narrative and story in a more literal and widely shared manner than we have seen so far, for they can become nearly synonymous and the common property of a group of people.
PLACE AND SHARED NARRATIVES
In Guatemala, indigenous Maya women and girls weave and wear brocade huipiles or traditional blouses just as they have for thousands of years, indicating by means of the brilliant colors, complex patterns, and use of space the community to which they belong. Each community has its own aesthetic, clearly displayed in each woman's garment These blouses show whether figures or images are meant to be naturalistic, geometric, or flat, or whether colors are to blend one into another or to be separate, bright, acidic, or contrasting. Styles of imagery differ from community to community, too. In Comalapa, a large indigenous community that lies at the end of a single lane road in the Highlands west of Antigua, dense brocaded naturalistic images often form the focal point of a huipil. In contrast, in nearby Poaquil, the main design element of a huipil is made up of unshaded, rigid images of abstract vegetation and cookie-cutterlike birds in highly contrasting colors. The women in Poaquil (see Figure 3) also include a liberal quantity of metallic thread in their garments which the women of Comalapa, for the most part, avoid, deeming it garish and insubstantial. These two towns, once a single community, now display a divergent design sense with a dissimilar use of color, form, and materials, making emphatically clear their now separate lives (Kellman, 1991).
The Maya woman's huipil also indicates by design, trim, and construction, the occasion for which it is intended, the wearer's economic status, age group, and expertise weaving on a backstrap loom. Because of the textual characteristics of these garments, market day in a Maya community is a living narrative, as a sea of gaily dressed women make clear with their garments their Maya ethnicity, social status, and ties to their home community (Kellman, 1991). In this manner, the town is celebrated and confirmed, for it is the literal site and grounding of community experience that links Maya people to one another and to their Maya past.
In some cases the relationship of narrative and place expand into even more complicated and long-lived narratives, as religious teachings, cultural history, and physical necessity come together in the specific places of a lifeworld. Australian aborigines sing, tell, and draw the complexities of their lives and landscape. The map of their home space is learned and remembered through both song and art as people relate stories of gods and holy sites, mythic events, and the location of resources in their environment all at one time (Chatwin, 1987).
The Western Apache, too, use place as an essential text for religious teaching and personal behavior. Their homeland serves as a constant, visible reminder of appropriate actions, important values, and religious truths, for the narratives of beliefs are literally grounded in landmarks. Water Flowing Under the Cottonwood Tree and White Rocks Lie Above in a Compact Cluster are both specific localities as well as stories (Basso, 1996). A woman explained "speaking in names" during a social interaction where a family sought to support a friend with both advice and understanding of a delicate family matter. Basso quotes, "We gave her clear pictures with place-names" so that by standing in front of the places, "she could hear stories in her mind, perhaps hear our ancestors speaking" (pp. 8283). In this manner, by suggesting a place, a Western Apache person can provide guidance for another by calling to mind the teachings of the ancestors.
The Pueblo people are similarly rooted to their ancient southwestern home through tradition, myth, history, and religious beliefs. The several villages, or pueblos, are themselves made of local earth. Dwellings, churches, kivas are all made of adobe, the traditional building material in the southwest for thousands of years. Though Pueblo people do not use places in the same manner as the Western Apache, their landscape and the communities themselves contain the dwellings and artifacts of ancient ancestors, as well as holy sites, which tie together individual lived experience and the content of Pueblo socio-cultural life. In Hucko's (1996) book of Tewa Pueblo children's art, the children talk about what is important in their lives. They create images that reflect their culture, their hopes and dreams, and the place they live. Ten-year-old Toni Herrera, whose Tewa name is Lake Flower, serves as our exemplar. Her bright oilpastel patchwork drawing with a central, white flower floating on a blue lake illustrates it perfectly. Her accompanying poem enlarges her theme. She begins, "My name sits on the soft, smooth lake" (Hucko, 1996, p. 35) and finishes her imagery with a description of spring and flowers beginning to bloom. Toni's description of her Tewa name is rooted in landscape; it enumerates qualities of her life-world, the surface of a family quilt, lightning and hard rain, winter, and the joy of spring coming to an often severe land. It is this spring world that Toni's drawing of a lake and a large white flower portrays, creating a narrative based on place and her own traditional name.
Though the Pueblo landscape does not provide a literal narrative as did the Western Apache homeland, it does contain the whole of tribal history, the grounding for religious beliefs, and the location of daily community and personal experience. It is in the form of homes and pueblos, ancient ruins, mountains, storms, and water that the Pueblo people are reminded of the values of their culture and that provide the setting for the creations of the Tewa children.
The earth itself can simultaneously provide the substance for text and imagery, according to Mallam (1987), archeologist and authority on the Iowa Effigy Mounds in northeastern Iowa. Created between C.E. 700 to 1200 by the hunter-gatherer people who lived in the area, the mounds, one to three feet in height, form a frieze along the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River. As Mallam photographed and documented the mounds, he began to detect a relationship between place and narrative in the huge shapes of birds, bears, and ovals. He came to understand the effigies as, "A great body of apologist literature. An oral tradition enshrined in earth," a means by which the indigenous people who built them attempted to "recreate the archtypal world where all is in order, undisturbed by humans" (Iseminger, 1986, p. 3). The native people expressed in the forms of the mounds an important community text, one that linked them to one another at the same time as it described their relationship to the place they lived. The still remaining effigies attest to the urgency of the ancient narrative and the importance of that text in the lives of the people who created it.
In these examples of the interplay of place and the narrative of events and meanings, away of "thinking in places," related in some manner to the spare elegance of the Western Apache speaking in names, develops. Place and narrative are natural companions; events always happen somewhere. Bachelard (1969) remarks, "Memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are" (p. 9). It is the particularity of each place and the remembered richness of each story that precipitates meaning for both individual and community.
CONCLUSION
Children as well as adults create meaning from the substance of their lives-family, community, home, constituting their experiences into stories. Created in the literal world of lived experience, stories are linked to place and then stored in memory, to wait until they are recalled to provide meaning and substance in the life of the person, or group of people, to whom they belong. Bachelard (1969) describes this linkage of place and memory. He writes of the specific places that make up each person's experiences, remarking that in remembering these places: "We cover the universe with the drawings we have lived" (pp. 12) .
The homes and communities in which children live provide material for engagement in what one might call the "art of place," as "lived drawings." Encounters with the local environment and investigation of place itself-parks and gardens, businesses, factories, dwellings, with or without the company of local experts, artists, and residentsprovide students an occasion to firmly link their art making to their own place and experience. Such explorations may also help to develop a greater sense of community, for these experiences provide a means for students to become more familiar with their world, to appreciate its richness, to see themselves as part of it, and to validate their experiences in it, just as the Western Apache see their environment as part of themselves and their gods. Student experiences, the narratives of the events of their lives and the places and spaces they inhabit, can provide grounding for authentic artmaking. Place, individual stories, and shared narratives can come together in the creation of an authentic art that celebrates and validates, as it binds the student artist to her own complex world. One can be certain of this, for we have seen the evidence in the art of Burchfield, Maya women's huipiles, and the cone of Kilauea. We have seen art itself created out of the place one is, or has been. We have seen art created out of the locations of these many lives.
[Reference]
REFERENCES
Adams, H. (1997, May). The heartland artist who broke the regionalism mold. Smithsonian, 28(2), 58-68. Bachelard, G. (1969). The poetics of space.
Boston, MA Beacon.
Baigell, M. (1976). Charles Burchfield. New York: Watson-Guptill.
Basso, K (1996). Wisdom sits in places. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico.
Chatwin, B. (1987). The song lines. New York: Viking.
[Reference]
Hucko, B. (1996). Where is no name for art. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research.
Iseminger, J. (1986, September 7). Seeing life's big picture. Des Moines Sunday Register, p. C 3.
Kellman, J. (1991). Weaving huipiles: Narratives of three Maya weaving women. Unpublished doctotial dissertation, The University of Iowa, Iowa City.
London, P. (1994). Step outside, communitybased art education. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Mallam, R.C. (1987). Indian Creek memories. Decorah, IA: Prairie Song.
[Author Affiliation]
Julia Kellman is an Assistant Professor of Art Education in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
