Providing tools and guidance: a daily commitment for teacher Nathalie Claude
Have you heard about this? A group of 25 students from Iguarsivik School have not only won an Initiative Prize, one of the Essor Recognition Awards categories, but their artworks are also on exhibit at Quebec City’s Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ) until June 2, 2024.
We met with a few of the key players in this project in order to tell you about it. Let us introduce the teacher who coordinated the project.
Every student at Iguarsivik School in Puvirnituq (Nunavik), from Grade 5 to Secondary 5, goes through art teacher Nathalie Claude’s classroom. This is the place where the work entitled Tarratuutiq | Taima came together over a period of one year, with students pursuing their artistic explorations under the teacher’s guidance.
In 2022, coming from a career in art instruction in Canada and the experience of creating playful projects for public spaces in Montreal, Haiti, Morocco and Nicaragua, Nathalie landed in Puvirnituq. Her mandate here was to teach art to students between the ages of 10 and 17 – students for whom English and French would be a second or even a third language. When the MNBAQ began its search for Nunavik teachers who would be interested in a project based on the works in its collection, her response was immediate.
From her first arrival in Nunavik, Nathalie had been struck by the beauty of the Arctic. And also by the open-air dump near the village, from which smoke billowed out whenever waste was being burned.
I was fascinated by all this immensity, by the beauty of the land and its purity… And at the same time, here was this shocking contrast with the open-air garbage dump on the outskirts of the village belching out its noxious fumes over the inhabitants. I asked my students about it; I wanted to know what they thought.
And so began the creative process.
“My work is really to accompany the students and provide a climate of trust for them, one in which they can feel comfortable exploring various media in order to express themselves in ways other than through language,” says Nathalie. “You have to take pleasure in the experience of creating, and laughter is so important!”
The artistic calibre of the students’ creations is impressive. As soon as Nathalie submitted images from the first series of artworks created in her class, the MNBAQ team were interested right away and eager to broaden the scope of the students’ message by introducing them to the public.
Discover the artworks and find out what the students themselves have to say about them ➔
Learn more about the MNBAQ exhibit Tarratuutiq | Taima ➔