Many people claim, "I can't draw!" Why? Perhaps because the idea of what the drawing should look like is more important than the drawing itself making it an act of frustration. Or maybe because small pieces of paper create the expectation to draw something that is recognisable. Very large sheets of paper, on which a stroke is created by using the whole body, free us from expectations and ideas about the end result.
Very large sheets of paper invite you to construct the drawing with strokes by using the whole body. The imagination can grow from what happens, what the eye sees, what the ears hear, how it feels. In this way, no cerebral, virtual castles in the air grow in advance, but concrete drawings emerge in the process, which are what they are. This is exciting because it creates space for self-exploration and for the non-judgemental observation of what emerges. For a 9th grade class from Berlin, this became a testing ground: for them to explore themselves and the vegetables that everyone brought to school in their lunchboxes every day. Carrots from Afghanistan!
Where do all these vegetables originally come from? What does the cross-section of a carrot look like at the cellular level? A visit to the microscopy centre of the Natural History Museum in Berlin opened the doors to this fantastic world. Back at school, the drawing notes from the museum were transferred onto large pieces of paper with coloured ink and layered on top of each other in keeping with the packed lunch. Large mind maps were made on the backs of these huge drawings to represent the knowledge the pupils had gathered during the project.
