To cover things up
/daek ting med ler’
`to cover things up/daek ting med ler´ is an intervention / workshop I developed for the culture festival Kulturmødet Mors. Following up on the concept of co-creating with children and the public, the only idea I had was that I wanted to start covering up reality with a layer of clay and see how the children would react and what the children would do or would like to do.
The intervention revolves around experiencing the clay as a material and the underlying world that we cover with the clay. While we are adding something to the world we also take something away, the natural structures and surfaces disappear, and what is left is only the formal resemblance of the underlying world.
Through the day I worked with different groups of children at two different locations of the festival. I started by working there on my own, and soon the children that passed by with their families would approach me and ask what I was doing. I would tell them I wanted to cover everything with clay, and then I‘d ask if they wanted to help me. I had already prepared slices of clay they could roll out with a rolling pin to make them thinner and then put them where they liked it the best. At the first location, we covered part of a tree, the ground with some apples on it and part of a little bench next to the tree.
At the second location I worked with only one girl for almost an hour. At one point she started to try out the different clay tools I had brought, to draw on the clay
and to build a little scenery on the rock we covered.
