Hand in Hand - part 2

LIVING IN THE MOMENT: Hand in Hand Session 2

Art and creativity can be used to develop emotional literacy, which is the ability to identify, express and manage different feelings and emotions. For the second Hand in Hand session we thought it would be interesting to try playing with different colours as a way to start conversations around this, using natural ingredients to dye fabric in buckets of water. One of the project’s aims is to measure wellbeing, and fabric dyeing could provide us with an opportunity to do this unobtrusively with the children who join the sessions.

Yellow is the sun and pineapple and emojis

Turmeric turned out to be the strongest ingredient we used and a real stainer of clothes, unfortunately for anybody who brushed past our washing line. Yellow sparked a brief conversation about happiness (because of the sun) and emojis as symbols of many different feelings. Interestingly, this meant that yellow was described by some children as the ‘colour’ of all sorts of emotions.

Red is a strong colour

Grated beetroot can be used as a dye and it made a very deep red which we used to soak and stir our fabric in. It was the colour chosen for painting space rockets. I wondered if red was an angry colour but nobody agreed with me: it is the colour of rockets.

Charcoal makes a good texture

The best thing about using charcoal to make black is that you can smash it to tiny pieces using a pestle and mortar. The dye we made was not that strong but it did create an interesting texture on the cloth.

Will grass make green?

This was a question I was secretly hoping would be asked. Plants such as chamomile, mint, nettle and plantain are said to make good green dye. We added grass and mint from the herb beds to our bucket but the results were not very spectacular. However, mixing some blue ink with turmeric worked wonders. It was agreed that green is a happy colour, along with yellow, pink, blue, purple, bananas, the sea, and butterflies.

Blue is smelly

As I hovered over a participant enthusiastically grating cabbage into a bucket I started to wonder if the session was going to instigate the deep discussions around emotional wellbeing that I had envisaged. Given the loveliness of the weather, the food, the singing, and the kaleidoscope of colours that we were so pleased to have created, asking questions about feeling ‘blue’ or where exactly you might feel sad or anxious in your body didn’t feel quite right.

A painting by Alexandra Reinhardt (Release, 2003) prompted further exclamations of joy (‘I love everything of it’ … ‘Because it’s so NICE’ … ‘The bright colours’ … ‘The whole thing makes me happy’). After clearing up the colour explosion with the rest of the gallery team, and standing back to watch the washing line full of fabrics drying in the breeze, I realised that the whole thing had made me happy too.