Recursive Gardens explores how Kindergarten and its educators shaped the development of 20th century art and design in Germany, and positions nurture rather than genius as a predictor of success. Paper weaving, a Kindergarten occupation, is both the primary material of the installation and a metaphor for how to build and mend the future in which the body is present, “women's work” is fundamental, and care drives the process.
How is drawing a means of meeting the world? This project began by sending toddlers with chal into a decommissioned military battery so they could talk back to the building. Their drawing reconnects the body to building scale. Children are invited to not just inherit the world, but create it, or find a world unsuited to their needs and values. The question becomes, how can one make, to allow for the unmaking? With the pattern of each passing generation, they will destroy what does not work and build a new layer of history. Like compost, where the past is not discarded, but becomes nutrients for the present. Shapes, jumbled, remixed, and translated across media are found in battery architecture, the surrounding landscape, and gestures of a drawing body. Play and shapes translated across media are methodologies to explore the making and unmaking of places and ideas in Allred’s installation, Accumulating Ruins, Inherited Playgrounds. These shapes become stencils for monotypes and wood embossing blocks. The monotypes are cut and woven, filling wooden frames and becoming the pages of an exploded poem. The blocks push sand into new relief forms for an interactive sandbox.
