Pictured: student nest assemblage
Insect ecologist Dr. Amy Mertyl, environmental scientist and artist Dr. Nicole Weber, and interdisciplinary artist Leah Craig worked together to guide cohorts of elementary school students through collaborative STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) projects resulting in a multi-part art installation, Our Place. Together with students, they explored local ecology and its interconnectedness with human experience, looking closely at ways that habitats in the more-than-human natural world inform architectural design in the built world. The title Our Place broadly addresses the idea of a site where living beings—including humans—can experience life-sustaining qualities such as rest, nourishment, safety, and belonging.
For Our Place: Nests, fourth-grade students engaged in a simplified engineering design process to generate a group installation of individual artworks.
Students began with a guided walk through the neighborhoods immediately surrounding their elementary school. Led by insect ecologist, Amy Mertyl, students looked for traces of (non-human) animal life and recorded their observations through a combination of written notes, rubbings, drawings, and bingo entries (per a visual bingo-game printout created by Mertyl). Drawing on the knowledge gained from their walk, students generated a working definition for the term 'nest.'
Students then researched ways that nests have influenced human structural and architectural design. For example, they observed how the Eastgate Center in Harare, Zimbabwe was designed with a passive cooling system inspired by termite mounds, and the way that the Beijing National Stadium in Beijing, China appropriates the look of a bird's nest.
Students also considered how the word ‘nest’ can be used symbolically. After identifying some ways that the word 'nest' is commonly used to represent different ideas, they came up with a list of their own associations. Their list defines a 'nest' as a place that is nourishing and supportive, where one feels safety and a sense of belonging.
Finally, the students observed ways in which artists have taken inspiration from nests, such as those in the 2016 exhibition “The Nest: An Exhibition of Art in Nature" at the Katonah Museum of Art. Drawing from this research, and working with an assortment of materials including recycling and found objects, students each designed and created a nest of their own in sculptural form (as pictured here). Each nest assemblage connects —conceptually, formally, or both—to a student's experience of their own 'nest.'
The group worked together to design a structure to collectively display their individual pieces. The display structure is a tessellation of hexagons, informed by bee and wasp nests.
All images copyright Leah Craig