Published in TRACEY | journal
Drawing Knowledge
May 2012
Drawing and Visualisation Research
DELEUZIAN DOLLS: SUBVERTING
MOTHER/DAUGHTER IDENTITIES
THROUGH INTERGENERATIONAL
COLLABORATIVE DRAWING
Linda Knighta
a
Queensland University of Technology, Australia
This paper explores concepts of desire and rhizomatic working through
a series of intergenerational collaborative drawing episodes.
Particularly, mother/daughter relationships are examined via drawings
created by the author and her young daughter. Drawings hold on their
surface unpredictable connections to things experienced, known,
conceptualized and imagined. In the context of this paper desire is seen
to drive adults and children into expressing and making a mark, to
make an imprint.
Here, the prompts that inform a drawing are regarded as a rhizomatic
network of chaotic actions and thoughts that connect each drawer to
the tools, the paper and each other in unpredictable and mutable ways.
The paper concludes by discussing how these intergenerational
collaborative drawing episodes offer opportunities to re-imagine
relationships, communications and learning in early childhood
education.
www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/
sota/tracey/
tracey@lboro.ac.uk
TRACEY | journal: Drawing Knowledge 2012
DRAWING AS COMMUNICATING
The drawings discussed in this paper are the result of a number of intergenerational
collaborative drawing activities between my daughter and I. It was a collaborative process,
as distinct from drawing in tandem, or interactively in the sense that both the mother and
child actively referred to the same stimulus (in this case dolls) while we drew on one sheet
of paper. We collaborated in terms of being actively willing to undertake a drawing, and we
collaborated in terms of beginning with the same stimulus, but we made no predetermined
agreement on what our respective contributions might contain, or on how each finished
drawing might look. Toy baby dolls and stacking ‘Russian’ dolls were placed near the paper,
but there was no pattern or assumption about how they might be referred to in our
drawings.
Even though our drawings are collaborative, we drew at the same time rather than
‘together’ to make ‘one’ drawing (a common term used in early childhood education in
relation to intergenerational arts activities). To this end, each of the drawings we produced
contained aspects that merged, aspects that sat apart, aspects that traced and overdrew.
These drawings then, look markedly different from many that are commonly produced by
adults and young children individually.
Intergenerational collaborative drawing interrupts historically dominant early childhood
drawing models that regard childhood art-making as personal, and a young child’s drawing
as being sacred and private (Lindstrom 1957; Lowenfeld 1975; Richards 2007). Childcentred pedagogies are often favoured in contemporary early childhood teaching manuals
(Herberholz & Hanson, 1995; Schirrmacher, 2006; Bouza Koster, 2005) that student
teachers access and learn their teaching knowledge from, so these help to maintain a
dominant view of children’s drawing and painting as something that an adult shouldn’t
interfer with.
Intergenerational collaborative drawing undermines that untouchability. Not only does
drawing collaboratively encourage adults and children to produce drawings collectively, the
experience of working at such close range can provide adult and child drawers with a
greater range of ideas and encourage them to push beyond their usual visual choices.
Intergenerational collaborative drawing contests education pedagogies that advocate for
solitary drawing, which can become laden with conventional visual schema such as
houses, rocket ships, people, monsters.
Drawing is not related solely to art production and should not be sentimentalised by adults.
Although images of children’s drawings often adorn websites, school hallways, greetings
cards, for a young child, drawing is sometimes but not always an isolated activity and it
isn’t always undertaken for art’s sake but can serve as a major communication tool to
process experiences, ideas and concepts about all manner of things.
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It can be difficult however for an adult to access information about these concepts in a
drawing that is produced by a child and then seen by the adult only on completion. By
preparing for and undertaking a drawing with children, adults can have much more detailed
exposure to a child’s imagining and theorising about things. Because they are working with
a child at close range they can have higher quality communication with children, and in
respect to education, teachers can engage in visual-based activity that is much more rich
and informed than providing a pre-drawn template of something to be coloured in.
Intergenerational collaborative drawing is mutually beneficial because it facilitates more
equitable exchanges of ideas, thinking and responding in a number of adult/child contexts.
It is important to challenge conventions around children’s drawings not just to improve
communication between adults and children. A persistent and dominant view in Western
education sees drawing as a useful preparation for the transition into writing (Caldwell &
Moore 1991; Olson 1992; Rich Sheridan 2002). This drawing-to-writing discourse suggests
that drawing is slowly disregarded as a central communication tool as a child matures, and
that this is a part of their ‘natural’ (i.e. it is automatic, universal) development. I suggest
this is not a natural transition but a learned one, influenced by many factors including
family, friends, curriculum, media, society. In the main, children do slowly begin to rely upon
the written word more than the drawn image to convey their ideas and theorisations,
however those who do persist and continue to use drawing as a central language can
commonly be labelled with titles of difference: arty-farty, creative, talented (as opposed to
academic), wacky.
This hierarchical regard for reading/writing competency needs to be dismantled; it no
longer reflects a global shift towards multimodal processes for information distribution and
reception. The quality of learning and communicating that occurs during a collaborative
drawing activity helps to challenge this writing hierarchy by giving positive messages to
children and adults about the value in using diverse communication skills, in early
childhood and well beyond.
CHALLENGING DOMINANCE
This paper focuses on a drawing process that involves both adults and children.
Irrespective of a familial or pedagogic relationship between the drawers this process
inevitably raises issues of dominance and power. It is a challenge to reconceptualise
dominant values and theories around parent/child, or teacher/child relationships,
particularly because many of them seem to support childrens rights and individuality
(Ghandini et al, 2005).
I am interested in contesting conventional ideas about mother/daughter relationships that
commonly present the mother as ‘expert’ knower and the child as ‘empty’ learner. I see
instead that mother/daughter identities can be fluid and unpredictable, that power doesn’t
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always reside with the mother, and that mother and daughter identities are far more
complex than simply dividing the mother’s identity between “the work/home,
public/private” (Stephens, 2004, p. 90) stereotype. Confronting stereotypical norms that
surround mother/daughter relationships provides opportunity to challenge and dismantle
constructed truths surrounding these roles, and to re-examine familial assumptions and
practices around who holds power and when.
Dobris & White-Mills (2006) suggest that patriarchal dominance may be disrupted through
“alternative feminist discourses” that challenge “traditional views of women and
mothering” (p. 35). Dolls were used for this project as a stimulus and as an antagonising
object to think about ‘mummies and babies’. I chose baby dolls as they present plastic,
enculturated symbols of motherhood/babyhood. I chose ‘Russian’ or stacking dolls for their
visual and cultural contrast to the plastic baby dolls. While the purpose of stacking dolls is
similar to that of the baby doll (a child’s toy that facilitates parental/familial role plays and
scenarios) their visual distinctiveness and physical characteristics provided us with
different compositional choices. By basing our collaborative drawings on these dolls, we
had opportunity to dismantle and re-imagine the mother and baby roles that surface when
they are played with.
Drawing together enabled us to begin to examine and challenge those residual objectivities
around mother/daughter identities. Because the aim was not to faithfully reproduce the
objects as a series of still life images (which might then separate us as drawers due to our
respective skills and experience in that genre) drawing collaboratively and responsively
(adding to each other’s marks and symbols rather than each doing a drawing of the thing in
front of us for example) helped to flatten out relational hierarchies which might exist
between us at other times. Collaborative drawing connected us as mother/daughter
through “communicable experience and empathetic understanding” (Brakman & Scholz,
2006, p. 54). The drawing act connected us to each other’s thoughts and ideas and
enabled us to work ‘outside’ our subjective and physical selves. Our collaborative drawings
explored how or whether my mother and her daughter identities and intersubjectivities
could be contested and dismantled through a shared activity. I value my relationship
with/to my child. However rather than uphold a one-directional responsibility of me
managing her growth and development, through drawing she and I can reform and
reciprocate our intersubjective roles through a continuing process of discovery and
exchange.
Our respective responses were not predetermined, and I believe we were able to neutralise
the culturally dominant mother/daughter role expectations we might perform at other
times. The drawing gave us opportunity to subvert otherwise present adult/child
hierarchies that play out in everyday life..
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DELEUZIAN DOLLS
This paper explores mother/daughter identities through written text, video footage and
drawings (figures 1 – 6).
FIGURE 1. OIL PASTEL, COLOURED PENCIL ON PAPER
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FIGURE 2. OIL PASTEL, COLOURED PENCIL ON PAPER
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FIGURE 3. CHARCOAL, COLOURED PENCIL ON PAPER
FIGURE 4. PASTEL, CHARCOAL, OIL PASTEL ON PAPER
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FIGURE 5. CHARCOAL ON PAPER
FIGURE 6. CHARCOAL ON PAPER
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The cultural texts (peer modelling, advertising, stories, film) that guide young girls in their
play and relationship building with baby dolls present distinctly gendered norms and
expectations around maternal, and nurturing skills. Because adults (who are not
necessarily women or mothers) are responsible for the design and marketing of such dolls
these toys essentially represent an adult’s rather than a child’s construct of what a baby
‘is’. However, not only is a baby doll a mute, emotionless version of a human baby, its
visual and physical manifestation firmly situates it within a cultural ideal of beauty, ability,
physicality, gender. Baby dolls were chosen then because they contain many layers of
meaning - the doll as baby, producing drawings of dolls that look like babies, drawings
created by a mother and daughter who share I am/have baby experiences. Stacking dolls
were chosen because they present a conceptual and visual contrast between the replica,
plastic baby doll and the stylised, handcrafted inter-stacking dolls, and they reference
different cultural examples of familial play items.
Our drawings were created at different times over an 18-month period, between 2008 –
2009. My daughter was then aged between 3 and 4 years old. Before we drew I asked my
daughter if she was happy to participate, and also if she was happy for the event to be
filmed. I was careful to explain to her that the purpose for drawing was to draw the dolls
and think about ’mummies and babies’. If she was ever not interested in drawing or being
filmed we did not continue with the activity.
Film footage of these drawing events facilitated observation of us as we drew, and the
multiple ways that we communicated as we drew. I now present a commentary that
responds to the drawing occurrences contained in the video data.
We were often deeply immersed in drawing. This intensity flowed into how we responded to
materials, the environment, the dolls, easel and drawing tools.
We engaged in cycles of silent and non-silent co-drawing, the silence or speech initiated
randomly and independently by either of us. I tried to avoid discussion via questioning but
preferred in the main to respond to my daughter’s commentaries, to try to lessen the
possibility of me shaping her experience or ideas. As we drew she often sat on my lap, and
this forced an intense and fluid physical interaction of our bodies as well as forming a
barrier between the paper surface and each of us. Personally, whenever this occurred I was
forced to change my usual, familiar drawing practice to one that negotiated my daughter’s
body space. I found through this that I began to revisit childhood bodily practices that
seemed more chaotic to me. My daughter liked to initiate this physical, intertwined way of
working – so maybe for her this seemed a more conventional way of drawing.
Our interactions were often playful – for example the action of scrubbing charcoal into the
paper and then blowing the residue off began to resemble a game where each of us took
turns to blow charcoal dust off the paper surface. This game also occurred when marks
were made and then erased, and the eraser residue was blown off the paper. However this
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erasing/rubbing out performed a dual role of being playful as well as symbolising the
unpredictability of our progress and how chaotically we disrupted more conventional (adult)
drawing practices. The action of erasing/rubbing out belied a deeply antagonistic act of
toppling a conventional adult/child power relationship; my daughter was able to simply and
effectively wipe out all my work without warning. I found this both extraordinary and
confronting. Although these drawings are the manifestation of a research investigation, and
therefore I made myself open to whatever might occur as we drew together, I do not usually
experience erasing out of my work by someone else. These drawing episodes forced me to
confront my own reactions to losing control over the content and direction of a work. I was
aware that this might be the experience for my daughter also; each of us were creating
drawings in unfamiliar circumstances, and negotiating the presence of the other. The
drawing acts we undertook during our collaborations enabled me to think critically about
the usual power relations that reside in parent/child relationships.
As we drew we each constantly disrupted and intercepted what the other was doing, forcing
each of us to embrace the unpredictable and work towards unknown conclusions. As an
example my daughter consistently wove in narratives around rain and thunderstorms as we
made our drawings. She was often more interested in exploring meanings around rain and
storms than the meanings the doll objects might offer. She also often expressed resistance
to the activity by declaring that she was going to ‘rub the dolly off’ (the paper). She would
rub her hands over the drawing to disrupt the image and my drawing of it. I cannot say
whether this was to take my attention away from the activity or for some other purpose, but
it often momentarily intercepted my focus in observing and drawing the dolls. Interestingly,
the outcome of this was not annoyance. I was often interested in the effect this rubbing
had on my drawing, and on many occasions it added a quality to the drawing that I would
almost certainly have missed if drawing alone. This interception presented me with
additional drawing methods. Likewise I often intercepted her drawing, adding marks,
rubbing out, smudging, drawing over. Her reaction was often one of amusement or quite
observation. I never observed frustration or anger at this, but that is possibly due to her
happiness that we were doing something together.
Our six doll drawings aren't pretty or sentimental because the doll images challenge
cultural ideas of the niceness of motherhood, and of the precious baby. Meanings around
mother/daughter identities that might have been attached to the dolls that we drew shifted
as we collaborated. This shifting reflected the connections to other meanings that informed
our respective undertaking of the act of drawing, and the tools and techniques we used to
make our drawings.
Our employment of multimodal communication tools (such as physical movement, spoken
dialogue, singing, onomatopoeic sound effects) to construct the drawings exposed us to
intersubjective and collective creating. For example, we used the same doll as object
matter a number of times, but the thought references that were pulled on during the
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construction of our drawings and the combination of physical drawing movements we used
as we drew differed, being unrepeatable to/by either of us. We collaborated in being a
mother/daughter in chaotic, “untimely ways” (Masny, 2005/2006, p. 151). On one
occasion we worked a second drawing over an earlier drawing (figure 4). We re-engaged
with a prior drawing and placed a new drawing over the initial one as we drew again. Our
drawing was fluid rather than it being an end result (something that has reached stasis,
something that has concluded). It briefly captured a moment of intersubjective
communication between us.
DESIRING AND BECOMING
Deleuzian & Guattarian (1972/1983) concepts of desire surface when examining familial
relationships of a mother and daughter through collaborative drawing. Our drawing process
was driven by desire, driving our arms and tools into making marks and visualisations. We
engaged in unconscious autoproduction, working outside our conscious bodies as ‘desiring
machines’ (Deleuze 1969/1990), connecting to machines that drive other connected
machines: hand, eye, thought, experience, with pencil, paper, charcoal. With the mind as
machine we became body-less, working with the hand machine, pencil machine, paper
machine. As desiring machines as we drew, we separately and constantly referenced other
things that were unconnected and fragmented (Deleuze & Guattari 1972/1983). This
fragmentation forced the drawings to progress in many unpredictable directions, prompting
discovery about the ability to express and make a mark, to make experience, to have an
imprint (on paper).
RHIZOME AND INTERCEPTION
Thinking of drawing as unconscious autoproduction that pulls on pre-existing references
challenges the idea of knowledge as being self-constructed or original. As MacNaughton
(2005) suggests, “we do not ‘make’ meaning; meaning is made external to us through how
texts are constructed by their cultural histories.” (p. 89). Mother, daughter, doll references
surrounded us during the production of our drawings. We encountered these influences as
a rhizomatic network, like 'flat' maps of influences or “circles of converging series”
(Deleuze, 1969/1990, p. 111) that we called upon during our drawing. Because the
rhizomatic maps that swarmed around us were unpredictable, the references that surfaced
were partial, dynamic, complex and multiple. They included snapshots of motherhood,
daughterhood, gendered play, femininity, cultural norms, belonging and social success. Our
interception of these and other references forced a sudden change of direction in the other
drawer, to bring about unpredictable and mutable alterations and to challenge our familial
adult/child power relationships.
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Deconstructing these drawings helps to challenge conventions around children’s art
practices, artist drawing practices, and conventional early childhood pedagogies that
regard drawing as a precursor to writing. Reconstructing them helps to consider how
drawings are able to convey interrelated meanings relating to the drawers’ culture/s and
intention/s. I can deconstruct and reconstruct myself as participant, mother, researcher so
that I may re-view our drawings, to challenge how my participant, mother, researcher
subjectivities affects my “will to truth” (MacNaughton, 2005, p. 120), my assumptions and
prejudices around each of these roles.
Our
drawings
reference
mother/daughter
identities
and
mother/daughter
intersubjectivities. Our drawing together connected us to networks of ideas that were
undefined and undetermined at the outset, but gave us a shared experience of ‘becoming’
mother and daughter.
CONCLUSION
Intergenerational collaborative drawing is a socially just practice because it shifts power
relationships, and in the context of this paper it exposed the conventions lurking in our
mother/daughter subjectivities. Intergenerational collaborative drawing implements
socially just practices in early childhood education contexts because it serves to unsettle
the “development of quality teaching and innovation in teaching as a technocratic process
where method matters.” (MacNaughton 2005, p. 194). Dominant beliefs around how to
best teach young children prioritise pre-constructed chapters of achievement based upon a
mono-cultural view of children. Despite the dominance of developmental theories, and the
more recent persuasive shift towards sociocultural framings of what/how children learn or
understand (Robbins, 2003; Rogoff, 2003; Vasquez, 2006; Vygotsky, 1978) ways of
communicating in early childhood are needed that acknowledge and embrace diversity.
There is a need to critique the cultural behaviours adults demonstrate to young children
explicitly through the curriculum, and implicitly through pedagogy to provide early childhood
educators with bridges to take them from acceptance to activism, or “truth to regimes of
truth” (MacNaughton, 2005, p. 26).
There is a need to challenge teaching skills that rotate around simplistic, universal
perceptions of the child; critical questioning of such models is compounded however due to
vastly differing education/training and face-to-face experiences of early childhood staff
(Elliot, 2006). It is vital though to support early childhood professionals in gaining
confidence to reject such models and practices and help them resist designing their
activities around achieving measurable outcomes and exclusionary, normative assessment
practices.
The intergenerational collaborative drawing detailed in this paper contributes to
pedagogical inquiry that seeks to subvert persistent, historicsed disocurses embedded in
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early childhood that position the child as deeply self-identifying. This collaborative approach
to drawing provided opportunities for reciprocity through multimodal dialogue as this
mother and child drew together.
Drawing seems an unlikely activity to affect change. It doesn't seem to align with any
philosophical paradigm, as an activity it has been firmly rooted within the specific area of
the fine/visual arts. Taking drawing out of the sole domain of arts practice and drawing
collaboratively in relation to the whole curriculum fosters intersubjective connections that
challenge deep-seated power structures embedded in discreet discipline-based
pedagogies.
When I began drawing with my daughter, it was difficult. I conceptualised about this project
via my artist, mother, educator, and researcher subjectivities. The regimes of truth
attached to these subjectivities came into play almost immediately as I began to work with
her. For example, as an artist I was used to working individually, through solitary practice
that requires me to independently apply knowledge to reach a structurally defined standard
of artistic professionalism. Our initial drawing collaborations made me question all aspects
of this practice, and particularly my artist subjectivity.
Our drawing collaborations fundamentally challenged me to deconstruct and reconstruct
my drawing practices and beliefs, to suspend what I had known to be ‘true’ and to be open
to new ways of working. Over time, and with lots of exposure to the collaborative drawing
process I began to fully enjoy this new approach to drawing, and to the shared construction
of them with my daughter. Her subjectivities were eye opening to me. She shared in the
process of deconstructing and then reconstructing, she helped me to examine my
subjectivities as a researcher, and our mother/daughter intersubjectivities, to alert me to
see how these are culturally constructed and upheld.
I now find that I have difficulty in drawing by myself. I look forward to collaborating with her
because she always surprises me and enriches my efforts through her responses to the
media and stimulus. This expands on my own practices and understandings. I now struggle
to make drawings that I like as much as those I produce with her. I see my own solitary
efforts as less rich than those that she is involved with.
I present this as a potent metaphor for deconstructing and reconstructing early childhood
pedagogies. Initially it is difficult to challenge deep-seated beliefs about the child and how
they learn, how they receive and process information, and the role the teacher/educator
has in all that. Challenging such beliefs facilitates transition from discomfort to expansion,
to use socially just pedagogies by challenging regimes of truth. I am filled with hope that it
is possible to change these deep-seated beliefs and behaviours through something as
simple as drawing together.
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