Arts Explorer #8: Magical Thinking

At first glance, you're probably thinking this is just a chair. You might say to yourself, "Hey, that is a mighty nice chair," but when it comes down to it, it's really just an object for sitting on.

Fair enough. On the surface, it's nothing more than a bunch of wood, sheets of fabric, cotton stuffing and some metal staples holding it all together.

But if you stop and take a closer look, you might be surprised at what you find...

Little closer...

Ah, yes: here we have the inhabitants of the chair.

The little known history of this curious fabric, known as Toile de Jouy or simply toile, is that these are not just fictional characters printed onto a beige background.

They are real people.

Take Jason here, for example. He approaches the two lovely ladies, who've been picking apples all afternoon and are resting under a tree. Jason wants to ask one of them out on a date but he's shy. Truth be told, she's not interested anyway, but unbeknownst to either of them, her friend is. Complicated, n'est-ce pas?

Maybe Sartre had it right...

L'amour consiste [...] à manipuler la liberté de l'autre... (Noudelmann, 1996, p. 76).

In any case, you'll also notice a young boy nearby, fighting to get his goat home on time. He knows his mom is waiting but he just can't get that stubborn goat to move. What to do?

Such complexity in this one small scene - imagine how many stories there are in all the toile of the world! Love, happiness, despair, anger, joy, exaltation... exhausting even to think about it!

Okay but what does all this made-up nonsense have to do with being an early childhood educator?

Part of working with young children is being able to imagine, improvise and make things up. Yes, I felt completely ridiculous making up a story about my chair but I think we pretty much need to get over it in order to be good ECEs. Kids don't hold back, and they don't mind looking silly - in fact, they usually encourage silliness as far as I can tell.

Engaging in pretend play is not only fun and exploratory, but also offers opportunities for growth and development. Children (and adults) can take on different roles, try out new ways of being, and push the boundaries of what they know. Magical thinking can even become visionary thinking, allowing us to innovate and create things that have never existed before. The number of possibilities we're aware of can expand if we just stop judging for a few minutes.

My art word of the week is design or composition. Schirrmacher and Fox (2009) list several criteria for assessing the design of a piece of artwork, but they do not touch on the process of getting to a balanced or beautiful design.
If, however, you use design as a verb, you can get some magical thinking going on. Throwing as many crazy ideas as possible onto the table increases the odds that you'll hit on one you like. Magical thinking lets us open up a bit and tap into other worlds, which makes for good conditions to support the design process and will probably result in more creative, interesting outcomes.

But it takes practice... hence the chair. It seems to me that letting go of feeling silly and inventing a crazy story is an exercise in magical design.

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References

Noudelmann, F. (1996). Sartre: L'incarnation imaginaire. Paris: 

     L'Harmattan.

Schirrmacher, R., & Fox, J. E. (2009). Art and creative

     development for young children. Belmont, CA:

     Delmar.