Allyson Yarrow Pierce loves to create art in all forms including wool, paper, watercolor and collage. She’s been back and forth between Rhode Island School of Design and Evergreen. She’s currently living in Olympia working at an organic wool blanket manufacturing company and taking a break from school.
Allyson Yarrow Pierce loves to create art in all forms including wool, paper, watercolor and collage. She’s been back and forth between Rhode Island School of Design and Evergreen. She’s currently living in Olympia working at an organic wool blanket manufacturing company and taking a break from school.

Children learn like this: creating, playing, thinking, mimicking, impressions, tactile wondering, repetitive characters, signs, and symbols. Sacred ancient forms of understanding. Physical feeling, wandering emotions. Repetitive situations and patterns; developmental behavior. This is how (good) stories are told. Fables have characters that carry the same steps and leave the same traces of ancient archetypes that travel through all myths in all cultures all created to teach and entertain.
Subliminal education interests me – education that occurs when your brain is turned off, when a loved one is sitting with you late in the glow of a blue night in a gold bed. When your thinking has ceased and your spirit starts walking. You are given the characters and situations and you now can assign them to your own life.
Why is this processor discipline education system the way we are choosing to teach our children and program our future? If we assign someone rules, they will stay within the parameter they have been assigned.
But, if we give them stories embedded with morals and patterns and archetypes that resemble life, we have ingrained in them an old knowledge that they can call upon in their own time, they can create their own reality founded on the principles found in characters—as long as this is a rich diverse cornucopia of tales.
I create pieces that resonate with me and my childhood education. I learned by reading fables. In order to understand and decipher my days I use the same feelings and images I read and learned from as a child. Tangled snakes, rocky bluffs, marching bands, field mice are all situationally sound tools to understand and process my experience. I don’t understand them when I create them, but after I finish I have my emotion laying in code in front of me. I hope this is a mirror for others, and a tool of the old and wise that will transfer to the new and ready.