Awakening Aesthetic awareness

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Awakening the Aesthetic Awareness

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An exploration to help adults to re-awaken their numbed sense with the help from the children

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distorts. Digital destroys. Experience is the only way to know

Sensing Nature;Knowing Nature: - The Philosophy “We Live Only To Discover Beauty, All Else Is A Form Of Waiting.”

Sensing Nature;Knowing Nature: The Event

Feeling

For the past 15 years I have been conducting a workshop for the children of aruvacode during the summer vacation.

The emphasis being awakening the senses, inline with the innate capacity of children. The children are made into 5 or 6 groups and do work related to one of the senses.

Since no instructions or judgments are given or made, no work is considered a mistake.

Beauty is the most fundamental of human existence. It binds us with our external world, creates culture-architecture, music, artifacts, various dance forms and agriculture.

Yet what is beauty? Where is it, what are its origins, most importantly how do children perceive or imbibe it…

The idea is to give children the freedom to explore and observe their surroundings more closely.

Most children are already very observant and know all the birds in the vicinity, their cries, different trees, their uses etc.

These are some questions that we enquire into, from which the fundamental issues that we try and address is the nature of learning. Biologically embedded aesthetic sense in children, role of teacher and do nothing method.

Beauty is awakened by our constant and concrete engagement around. Our senses are what connect us to the outside world giving us an experience of it and awakening our aesthetic sense.

A good musician needs good ears more than anythingelse, a painter needs an eye that truly sees, and a theatre person observes life around them. All art forms are a result of the development of one of the senses. Our art, painting, writing and other activities stem from it. So the workshop focuses on awakening the senses than teaching any specific skills. This will do less harm to the child and preserve his sense of creativity and originality. A deep awareness of these senses, to use them consciously and minutely will make children more observant and sensitive to the world around them.

More importantly let them experience the world for all its beauty as a whole human being.

“A child educated only at a school Is an uneducated child.”Santayana

Knowing Sensing

Unfortunately modern education believes in mediating knowledge without experience. It refuses to recognize that awakened senses are the natural quality of all living beings.

School replaces this innate intelligence with the 'knowledge' of 'experts'.

Today the educated is busy creating a homogenized world.

Traditional artisan context, where institutional conditioning is not taking place is where one understands and finds true aesthetic sense. Children 'untutored' left to themselves respond to their surroundings in a very creative and meaningful way.

This is visible in their toys and games. They respond to the world through their senses in a very innocent, happy and true way which is very characteristic of a child.

We being victims of modern education, our only hope of dealing with our cognitive damages are to learn from children.

Nature

So all I try to do is acknowledge and appreciate this natural capacity and try to get them to explore and observe more.

LISTENING TO NATURE: The workshop begins with all the children sitting in silence and listening to the sounds of nature that usually go unheard. Children are naturally inclined to these sounds and this is expressed through the sound related games that they play.Wistles made out of leaves, rattles, imitating bird sounds etc.

We also bring some incense sticks and at the end and some sweet is given and the children are asked to eat as slowly as possible.

COLOUR IN NATURE Colour scale Children collect dry leaves and arrange them and from the basic colours they on their own mix and makes the colours. All children are able to do this which proves that they have a ‘non reasoning’ method.

Scenary from dry leaves

Negative space

Colours of the soil

Scenary with coloured magazine

Toy is a construct of the modern adult mind - like ‘art’. There is no word ‘toy’ in non literate communities. Children engages with the world to make sense of it. Toy is the means for reconstructing what they see and they make sense of it in their play. Children learn THE experience and not from experience as is understood by the fragmented adults.