let's play

Dear Grown-up, Way back in the mid-19th century, a man named Friedrich Froebel invented Kindergarten when he founded the Play Activity Institute in 1837. He was a pioneer in early childhood education, and a strong advocate for the importance of free play in children. His Kindergarten classes were structured around a series of "gifts," designed to be given to a child in order to inspire innovation and self-directed activity. These concepts spread around the world, and as a result, the young students attending the first Kindergartens grew up to be some of the most innovative and creative thinkers of the 20th century. From the founders of the Bauhaus and modernist art movements, to American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, many young minds blossomed and thrived simply because they were given the gift of play.

Let's Play––the Make-it, Build-it, Paste-it, Do-it Super Fantastic Fun Kit!––was inspired by the ideals that Friedrich Froebel put forth so many years ago, along with recent scientific research working to promote the importance of play in the lives of both children and adults. In our fast-paced, high-tech modern society, we are losing sight of how beneficial unstructured, free, creative play can be to our physical, emotional, and cognitive well-being. 

Let's Play was designed to bring the gift of play to those who need it most. Working with Olmsted County Social Services, I created this kit to be used as a tool to engage young children in at-risk home environments, and help parents and caregivers learn to bond with the child while realizing the benefits of free, creative play in their own lives.

It is my hope that the simple materials inside of these kits can bring the gift of play into a child's life––inspiring a lifelong love of curiosity and ingenuity, and serving as a creative outlet wherein dreams are born, inventions are made, and imaginations are allowed to run wild...

Happy Playing!  Aimee Gauthier, May 2009

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(what precedes is a glimpse into my senior thesis project, a semester-long labour of love that is still in its final stages of production. click on an image for a closer view...)

delicious dishes

My recent travels north brought me to a lovely roadside flea market, wherein the dishes looked good enough to eat. I bought this souvenir tray–– 

an ode to the dandelions.

north

Nurturing fantasies of escape, I headed north this weekend to a magical place they call Git-che-O-ni-ga-ming, or Grand Portage, meaning "a great carrying place," in Ojibwe and French. It is the home of the breathtaking High Falls, Minnesota's tallest waterfall! Sunsets over Superior were followed by a night-walk filled with cherished moments of quiet, as we inhaled the breezes void of complication, counted the ripples off skipping stones, and I marveled at the capacity of shiny shoreline pebbles––a beauty majestically void of manufacture. 

when we are lost

When we are lost what image tells?\Nothing resembles nothing. Yet nothing\Is not blank. It is configured Hell:\Of noticed clocks on winter afternoons, malignant stars,\Demanding furniture. All unrelated\And with air between.\The terror. Is it of Space, of Time?\Or the joined trickery of both conceptions?\To the lost, transfixed among the self-inflicted ruins,\All that is non-air (if this indeed is not deception)\Is agony immobilized. While Time,\The endless idiot, runs screaming round the world. 

-Carson McCullers

I graduated last weekend, to some degree. And this evening I stumbled around in space, collecting the fallen branches of the cottonwood trees in my empty pockets. 

serendipitous scraps

These got me through this most hectic of weeks: A lovely petite book, and some lovelier scraps I happened upon in the studios one morn, turned into a 30-second collage impromptu. And, lovelier still, is...collage club! plus the rest of Jordi Ferreiro's Flickr site. Check out more of his work here. 

perpetually patterned

These days have passed. I've pounded streets, in the same manner as the rest. Eyes down. Left dragging right. Left with right. Repeat. This is a life of perpetual patterns, of the unwavering absence of an atrium beat, of the pretending underneath a nest of sheets, of the fleeting visions of a technicolor reality, wherein your eyes are always illuminated.

These days have passed. Your kaleidoscopic face, it presses. Printed seductive in four-color process. Dyed permanent into the bedtime blanket that I toss aside in the morning, and crawl back underneath by the night that is certain to fall. 

"The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect." --Carson McCullers

portfolio daze

A drizzly quick trip to NYC and now I'm back home in a flash. Here's the view from my table at the ADC portfolio review day. Everyone especially appreciated and dare I say swooned over my attempt to save the newspaper or something called The Citizen Cheyenne. JK DCL.

play for breakfast

Woke up bright and early this morning and snuck into school to assemble and hang my senior project show, which now sits quietly in its little nook at MCAD, greeting passers-by. Thanks, mum, for your measuring, leveling, and sewing skills. (More details on the project later).

Tomorrow I'll wake even earlier to embark on a grand adventure with this lovely lady and this sly chap to the streets of New York City for the Art Director's Club portfolio review day, as well as other grand adventures involving big brudder, and some of other crazy folks. Excitement, exhaustion, and exhilaration exudes...