Art with nature, not materials

I am inspired by stories of learning, especially stories in which lack of materials, supplies and other supposed obstacles don't hold back the tremendous human curiosity and need to learn. Here comes a story from Bolivia, of early childhood educators who created spaces for learning art, situated in the natural world, without many supplies that are often considered essential to artistic explorations.

From Exchange Everyday, August 19, 2010, Art from Nature:

The World Forum Foundation is enriched by its partnership with the early childhood community in Bolivia.  Led by Maria Carmen Schulze (to whom this work is now dedicated) and Roxana Salazar, early childhood educators in Bolivia have explored how they can promote children's creativity through art in even the most impoverished settings.  The result is a series of beautiful, bilingual books sharing how to promote drawing, modeling, and construction with natural materials.  In the introduction to the second book in the series, Modeling with Children Under Six Years Old, Salazar and Schulze explained their challenge:

"….We realised that we needed to provide alternatives for what we did not have.  For example, where we did not have tables, we had flat areas of earth; where we did not have pencils, we had branches and charcoal; where we did not have white papers, we had old newspapers and flat stones;  where we did not have colours, we had plants, flowers, fruits and soil; and where we did not have teachers, we had mothers and young community volunteers.  The constant was, however, that we always have children who want to live, to learn, and to dream.  We discovered that the transcendental value of living was strongly rooted despite the lack of materials in this urban or rural poverty context…

"In short, this situation motivated us to begin looking for alternatives and real possibilities, and to promote sustained creativity in the minds of the children and the community educators.  The situation of poverty should not paralyze our aspirations and the integral development of our children.  On the contrary, we found that the context of poverty was the genuine source of our liberation.  In that web of miseries and ventures, we were able to find solutions by using what was in the environment.