Building communities through drawing
Giant Doodle
The Giant Doodle, initiated at Western Sydney University Open Day 2023, began as a fun activity to bring students together. For many of these young individual the last 3 years was marked by societal upheaval and isolation as substantiated by post-Covid mental health research. The Giant Doodle evolved and was facilitated within the first-year Visual Storytelling Subject by Dr Janet Saunders and Khoa Tran. It’s aim was to harness human mark-making as a visual storytelling tool, fostered drawing confidence, and nurture interpersonal connections among students.
Participating students were encouraged to engage in spontaneous drawing and doodling with the freedom to respond to, or ignore, a loosely dotted background, thus enabling a freeform creative process. They could choose to draw what they typically doodled or enhance existing drawings. Students were encouraged to reflect on their evolving relationship with drawing and the thematic preferences that organically emerged, shaping their collective identity as a community.
The Giant Doodle transcended its initial inception, evolving into a compelling platform for the development of a larger narrative, woven around the overarching theme of “People, Place, and Planet”. The diverse, yet seemingly unrelated images were drawn on a very wide format, presented a storytelling and compositional challenge for participants.
From the students’ creative solutions, three central motifs emerged: the enduring symbol of the snake, representing nature, strength, creativity, and continuity across diverse cultural traditions (including the local indigenous community); the infinity symbol, denoting life’s unceasing interconnectedness; and the watchful eyes of humanity. This amalgamation of students’ ideas encapsulates a narrative of hope, symbolized by the ouroboros—the snake biting its own tail—coupled with John Wallis’s infinity symbol, and the eyes of humanity set against a backdrop of expanded collaborative imagery and themes highlighting their notion of people, place and planet.
Improdraw 