Grade 9 History of Art | Light, Space, and Perception

In this Grade 9 History of Art project, students stepped into the worlds of James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson, artists who shape perception through light, space, and the quiet drama of seeing. Instead of beginning with monumental installations, the class began with something intimate: a small piece of clay, bread, or Play-Doh warming in the palm.

For one minute, students shaped their material instinctively, guided not by plans or aesthetics but by the simple pleasure of touch. A gesture, a pressure, a fold. Haptic curiosity at its most direct. As one student wrote:

“The art lived in the moment when my hand stopped sculpting, and the shape found its own meaning.”

This tiny sculpture then travelled into the students’ homes. Each student selected a site where the light and space created a moment of poetic perception: a window ledge, a stairwell, a kitchen counter at dusk. They were encouraged to look for spaces where perception itself becomes the medium, where light, matter, and viewer merge into something fleeting but profound.

And then the transformation began.

As the clay met light, the works shifted and came alive. Students started to notice how illumination redraws the world in real time. One reflection captured this beautifully:

“The art lived in the moment when the light brought out the textures and shapes of the clay, transforming its form into shadows and moving patterns.”

The project then expanded outward. Students invited a viewer, a sibling, a parent, a friend, to look at the sculpture in its chosen light and respond to a central question:

Where does the art live?
In the clay? In the light? Or in what you feel as you look?

This simple question opened the door to something much larger: a phenomenological exploration inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. Students began to see that artworks are not static objects. They are events, moments, relationships.

One student discovered this as soon as the viewer entered the frame:

“My shadow became part of it. When I moved, the sculpture changed.”

Another reached an even deeper insight:

“Art lives in what I feel while watching. The clay and the light are tools, but the feeling gives them meaning.”

Across the class, a remarkable pattern emerged: students began to see art not as something made, but as something activated. Something that flickers into being in the moment light meets form, or when one person begins to truly look at another person’s creation.

One student’s viewer captured the essence perfectly:

“The space between the clay under the lamp created its own dimension.”

In these small experiments, the home became a gallery, the light became a collaborator, and the viewer became part of the work. What the students discovered is that art does not always live in museums or studios. Sometimes it lives in the gentle shadow cast across a tabletop. Sometimes it lives in a breath of light. Sometimes it lives in the moment someone finally pays attention.

This was the heart of the project: the art does not live in the clay itself, but the living space between material, perception, and the human gaze.