Newport Station School

 

Newport Station School  Acadia Revisited - Historic St. Croix

100 students from grade 1 to 6 immersed themselves in their Acadian heritage and produced art pieces, which include a triptych representing the experience of the original French settlers and a hooked rug on a similar theme.

In 1703, the first Acadian cottages stood near the head of the St. Croix River.  The small community, Les Cinques Maisons, was built where Newport Station school is now located.  A road that was built by the Acadian farmers in the early 1700’s borders the property of the school.  The school worked with a local historical society to build their knowledge about the Acadian families who settled in the area throughout the eighteenth century. During the school year of 2003-2004, Newport Station celebrated the 200th anniversary of Acadian settlement with a project that combined music, songwriting, dance, cooking, local tours and textile studies. Throughout this project, students focused on aspects of Acadian history and heritage in their Social Studies curriculum, as well as other curriculum areas and worked with artist Rose Vaughan to create this outstanding mixed media textural installation, depicting the Acadian village of St.Croix.

Statement by Project Artist Rose Vaughan

We began our exploration of Acadian history and culture by examining the materials in the 'Acadian Kit'  that we were able to borrow from our Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History. This led to a lot of discussions and drawings by the kids. We decided to portray the peaceful life of the Acadians, prior to the Deportation, in a hooked mat. We chose out one aspect from each drawing to include in the design for the rug, mocked up the design in coloured paper, then transferred it onto the backing for the rug. We cut and ripped cloth in preparation for the hooking. It was a very 'new' experience for these kids to work at a group activity that developed so slowly (13,770 stitches in all!).  A few kids wanted instant results and felt impatient, but others loved the "slow but steady" progress of the project, got into amazing conversations (like an old time quilting bee) while we worked and expressed enormous satisfaction with their accomplishment!  I was delighted to find out that some of the star rug hookers were boys and loved that our rug hooking also drew in lots of other staff members and kids from other classes at recess and lunchtime.  Some wanted to check our progress, and others wanted to help us!

We used our triptych to describe three aspects of Acadian History - an Acadian Village (predeportation), the inside of an Acadian home, and the Deportation.  So we were always thinking of texture, colour, sculptural details, and ways of rendering costumes and artifacts.  This project really appealed to the "detail" kids.They loved using everyday materials (scraps from the rag bag, things from the recycle bin, twigs, string, rafia) for new applications and talked a lot about how to capture suitable moods for each panel of the triptych.  I had never attempted a work like this before and was very open to inventions and suggestions from the kids as we went along.