I must confess I have a bias when choosing subjects for my interviews. I spent the majority of my professional and personal life as an artist. Therein lies my bias and that led me to interview Emily Hall, the Wilton-Lyndeborough Cooperative Middle and High School art teacher.
I first met Emily when we moved from one house to another almost three years ago. I had to eliminate many art supplies and a collection of art screens that were constructed by the WLC shop class decades ago for use during the Wilton Art and Film Festival. They had been stored in our barn and had no home in their future. I took both the supplies and the screens to the high school and placed them in Emily’s care.
Since then, I’ve witnessed her with her students on a number of occasions. This time I asked if I could interview her in her classroom. I got more than I expected and left the class with more than art on my mind. What I left with were thoughts about how the creative process, singularly and as part of a team, touches all parts of a person’s life beyond just making art.
What I mean can be explained by what I heard and witnessed while in her classroom during two classes. One was a high school sculpture class, and the second was a puppetry class for sixth graders, yet both became part of my thoughts about the importance of artistic expression.
During the first sculpture class for high school students, Emily began the lesson by asking them to write down two contrary emotions they would later translate into three-dimensional sculptures using only paper collected from magazines or elsewhere with no glue or other external way to attach them. The purpose was to find easy ways to express feelings in a tangible, comfortable, immediate and understandable manner – a method that could perhaps be used in the future as a way to transcend emotions or symbolically express those that build up when words fail.
There was a second part of this project that was less tangible but had a resonating impact. The sculptures were to be created individually, but within a team of at least three students, to illustrate the power of collaborative thinking and creating that opens the mind to new ideas through teamwork.
At the end of the session, students were asked to write about what they learned and share it during the next class. Emily sent me some of these replies:
“Overall, it was an eye-opening experience, and I learned a lot about my classmates and expression through art.”
“This collaboration has inspired me to dare more in the future, with people I don’t know and ideas I don’t know.”
“While walking around, the vibe was completely different. Every one of my peers was focused, and in a zone of creativity and thought.”
The second class I observed was devoted to puppet-making. The assignment was to create puppets that reflected something important to themselves in some manner. Some of the students chose to illustrate favorite pets or fantasy characters. Others chose to depict either themselves or, perhaps, their alter-egos.
This lesson fell in line with Emily’s passion for puppetry. She views it as a way to instill self-confidence and self-expression using puppets, outcomes that might be impossible without having a puppet as your voice. She pointed out that puppetry allows people to express themselves in unexpected ways.
The goals she wanted to achieve with the students who were making puppets also coincide with some of the goals she wanted to meet in the first sculpture class I visited. The lessons learned through these exercises showed students how to reach into their own lives to express their own truths. They also experienced how to push their expressive comfort zones in a group setting. Emily told me one of her goals as an art teacher is to foster confidence in self-expression. With that as a goal, both of these class projects were a success, from what I witnessed.
During this discussion, I asked Emily how she became the WLC art teacher in 2019. She replied:
“I grew up in Milford until the seventh grade, then my family moved to Amherst. After I graduated from Souhegan High School, I left New Hampshire to attend James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where I studied graphic design and later, worked in that field for eight years. But I became discouraged, being behind a computer all day. Outside of work, I was surrounded by amazing artists of all sorts, from those in the fine arts to singers, dancers and musicians. We even established an organic puppetry program for adults that ran for several years. We wrote our own scripts and put on performances that we all participated in in some manner. These were the same people who encouraged me to teach, saying ‘Emily, you’re such a good teacher. It’s what you should be doing.’”
She continued, “with their encouragement, I decided to enroll in grad school at Virginia Commonwealth University to get my teaching degree. Afterwards, I remained in Virginia another three years teaching inner-city youth. After I accepted the position of art teacher at WLC , I realized it felt like a homecoming after being away for so long. It’s the perfect job for me.”
After I watched her light-up while working with her students and their puppets, I asked Emily if she missed working with puppets herself. She confessed she had a dream of someday facilitating another such program for adults living in the Monadnock area. Maybe if a few people reach out to her, it will happen sooner rather than later.