Tuning into the frequencies: Interpreting children and young people’s abstract mark making through a semiotic approach

Frequencies is an artistic initiative developed by Turner Prize-winning artist Oscar Murillo, as an enterprise which opens connections between children and young people geographically thousands of miles apart. The Frequencies initiative has involved the Murillo Studio Team laying empty canvases across desks and tables, in hundreds of schools, across over 30 countries and five continents. Children and young people, ages 10–16 years, are invited to freely mark the empty canvases. In this article, I discuss a research project that examined a sample of marks made by children and young people on the Frequencies canvases. I identify abstract (non-figurative nor textual) marks created by children and young people, across various cultural and geographical spaces. Through the article, I apply a semiotic approach, drawing on indigenous and philosophical ideas that posit human and more-than-human worlds as deeply interconnected – suggesting these abstract marks as a manifestation of our deep connectedness. I highlight the forms and potential functions of abstract marks produced by children and young people, as a system of signs that may tune into the deeper aspects of self, potentially shared beyond social identities, cultures, spaces and histories. Paying attention to the abstract, and potentially, universal mark making of children and young people may support wider understandings about how self and subjectivity is expressed through free creativity.