DRAWING & KAZUKO
Taro was a summer baby. His birth one hot July day in north London meant that he would always be young for his class. He’d left his nursery, with its familiar smells of paint and plastic chairs, left friends and the gentleness of just three days of classes. It was now September and he was moving to the big school with the big kids. Friendships were already tight between children who’d not moved schools but were simply shifting from the affiliated nursery to its primary school. On Taro’s first day he refused to let his mum leave, so Kazuko locked her small frame into a kid’s chair and sat quietly in the corner of the classroom. Taro spent the day absorbed in making a paper plane, this complete involvement was deliberate – he never once looked up to engage with the other kids. The objects and drawings he made were always figurative, so it was strange when, in his first two weeks of school, he began drawing an abstract scatter of circles. Sitting in his bedroom he directed his mum to copy him, she drew one small circle at a time, then a speckle of dots. Their pens then stained the tiny fibres of the sugar paper with a series of lines linking each circle to the next. The symbolism was clear to Kazuko. It’s two years since Taro moved schools and made this drawing, in that time he has made lots of friends.
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