In 2009, we (Caitlin Reilly and Kate Stead) spent a few months drawing as we looked up from where we stood in the world - Caitlin in China, Kate in Australia. The result of that visual dialectic is a book entitled Looking Up From The Other Side Of The World.
To share our experience of both cultural exchange and unification, we invited our local schools to participate in a similar adventure and draw their own findings. This book is a culmination of that project.
In Shanghai, the students of the Seven Flower Elementary School looked up and saw the tall buildings that surrounded them. The sky some days so blue other days so grey. When asked to close their eyes and reflect on the morning view they came to draw the people they looked up at the trees they saw and the colors of the buildings memories of experiences some are of their visit to the Shanghai Expo and perhaps imagined experiences that revealed their own looking more clearly.
In the township of Maclean, N.S.W. Australia, the children looked up to the tops of nearby buildings including the Catholic Church with its Sandstone bricks and stained glass windows; they saw a towering teacher who is apparently defined by his glasses and may, or may not be wearing an argyle knit. When their teacher, Mrs Donelan, released a bunch of balloons, they saw the magic of bright colours lighting up an otherwise dull, grey sky; and like us, they saw the ubiquitous electricity pole which draws its own parallel black lines across the sky all over the world.
To draw is to look each glance assembles evidence and through the eyes of these children from these two schools we have arranged a document that anchors their vision to a time and place forever cementing a perspective that innocently reveals a small insight into their world.
These two books are visual dialogues from 2009 – 2011 that emphasize the nature of drawing as a tool for communication.
All the drawings from the participating school children are curated in Looking Up From The Other Side Of The World - Through The Eyes Of Children as well as the collaboration between Caitlin Reilly and Kate Stead in Looking Up From the Other Side of the World were exhibited at the Xuhui Art Museum Shanghai from October – November 2011.
Curated by Artists Lin Qing and Caitlin Reilly.