In this article, the author explores children’s destruction of their artwork as it occurs on paper or digitally via an interactive whiteboard. Sociocultural accounts of children’s art-making and social semiotic approaches to meaning-making offer a theoretical lens for understanding children’s acts of destruction as meaningful and the way in which different semiotic resources shape the meaning-making involved in destruction differently. In order to explore this further, the author considers two episodes of art-making: firstly, an episode of child–parent art-making that ended in a five-year-old child scribbling over a drawing on paper with a black crayon, and, secondly, an episode of a five-year-old child using touch to cover over the drawing she had made on the classroom interactive whiteboard during free-flow activity time. A comparison between these two episodes is used to explore how digital and paper-based semiotic resources may impact differently on the experience of destruction and the affective and relational work that it can achieve. In this article, the author argues that a social semiotic exploration of destruction can help to move discussions of children’s art-making beyond developmental preoccupations with individual intentions and towards a post-developmental account that engages with the richness of children’s experiences and actions.
‘We’re just gonna scribble it’: The affective and social work of destruction in children’s art-making with different semiotic resources
