This is Just What I Saw

This is Just What I Saw installation by Katerina Hruskova at Martin Hall Gallery, University of Loughborough, 2019

Inspired by the archive of influential art teacher and child art movement pioneer Marion Richardson (1892-1946), This is Just What I Saw was a collaboration between artist Katarina Hruskova and Reader in Human Geography Sarah Mills. It combined archival research, participatory workshops with children and young adults, sound, and installation.

Richardson's methods of teaching art were far removed from the emphasis on copying from life practiced by most of her contemporaries. Instead, she sought to arouse children’s visual awareness, to encourage self-expression and to enable pupils to evaluate their own work. Her pupils would sit with closed eyes, perhaps listening to a description, and wait for images to appear in ‘the mind’s eye’. Richardson situated her approach between “training which is discipline and creativity which is art”. Her archive at Birmingham City University provides an entry-point to examine a number of themes relating to the geographies of education and the philosophies, spaces and practices of learning and its material cultures.

Drawing on this, Hruskova produced lyrical, descriptive soundworks that were utilized in workshops led by her and Dr Mills, in which participants produced drawings in response. These drawings informed the design of three carpets, which also included representations of gestures made by participants. These carpets were exhibited in Loughborough University's Martin Hall Exhibition Space along with the soundworks utilized in the workshops, poetic texts designed to stimulate 'the mind's eye' and reproduced materials from the Marion Richardson archive.