Residency at the Jeremiah Burke High School in Dorchester
Advisor: Professor John Crowe, Massachusetts College of Art and Design
Host Art Teacher: Alisa Rodny, Jeremiah Burke High School
In Collaboration with: CAST Boston (Community for Arts and Sculptural Training Boston, Inc). CASTBoston's mission is to create affordable opportunities for teens and adults to explore and receive instruction in the art of sculpture.
Overview:
In this residency, I am deepening my investigation of making large scale Oriental Bittersweet vine sculpture in collaboration with urban teenage students in the high school setting. Students offered initial design concepts and I worked with CAST Boston to solve structural problems posed by the design ideas. I have worked in a space off of the art classroom to create it. Students have helped me with certain aspects of making the sculpture. Because of the structural needs that are required by the scale of the project, as well as time and curricular constraints, their role unfortunately ended up being more as apprentice than collaborator. The goal of the project is to create art that is expressive of the Burke students and will be a vehicle to communicate the students concerns in a constructive and visually compelling way.
Design:
On Thursday December 22, I met with students to figure out what form this sculpture would take. I presented the project overview to the whole class and invited students to brainstorm with me in the hall to figure out what sort of sculpture to make. The students who contributed the most in this planning session were Julie, Robert, Zequaya, and Esohe. We agreed that it would be cool to make something that is not your average sculpture. It should be BIG, make people notice and say “woah” and have the potential to get the attention of the media and get on TV. We also agreed that it should describe them and the issues they deal with, and be controversial without being offensive. The topics they raised as being most concerning were violence in the community, messages being pushed at them from the media and the entertainment business, and consumerism. We thought the best idea was to make a blindfolded face, half boy / half girl, about 7’-8’ tall, and sited on the Washington St. side of the building in front of the flagpole. The guiding questions that this piece raises are: “What are we blinded by? What are we blind to?”
Materials:
Plywood structure, covered in oriental bittersweet vines.
Benefits:
This is an unusual opportunity for students to participate in the creation of large scale sculpture, seeing through the project from initial ideas to completion. Students have the opportunity to engage in hands-on complex problem solving, and learn construction techniques.
Host Art Teacher: Alisa Rodny, Jeremiah Burke High School
In Collaboration with: CAST Boston (Community for Arts and Sculptural Training Boston, Inc). CASTBoston's mission is to create affordable opportunities for teens and adults to explore and receive instruction in the art of sculpture.
Overview:
In this residency, I am deepening my investigation of making large scale Oriental Bittersweet vine sculpture in collaboration with urban teenage students in the high school setting. Students offered initial design concepts and I worked with CAST Boston to solve structural problems posed by the design ideas. I have worked in a space off of the art classroom to create it. Students have helped me with certain aspects of making the sculpture. Because of the structural needs that are required by the scale of the project, as well as time and curricular constraints, their role unfortunately ended up being more as apprentice than collaborator. The goal of the project is to create art that is expressive of the Burke students and will be a vehicle to communicate the students concerns in a constructive and visually compelling way.
Design:
On Thursday December 22, I met with students to figure out what form this sculpture would take. I presented the project overview to the whole class and invited students to brainstorm with me in the hall to figure out what sort of sculpture to make. The students who contributed the most in this planning session were Julie, Robert, Zequaya, and Esohe. We agreed that it would be cool to make something that is not your average sculpture. It should be BIG, make people notice and say “woah” and have the potential to get the attention of the media and get on TV. We also agreed that it should describe them and the issues they deal with, and be controversial without being offensive. The topics they raised as being most concerning were violence in the community, messages being pushed at them from the media and the entertainment business, and consumerism. We thought the best idea was to make a blindfolded face, half boy / half girl, about 7’-8’ tall, and sited on the Washington St. side of the building in front of the flagpole. The guiding questions that this piece raises are: “What are we blinded by? What are we blind to?”
Materials:
Plywood structure, covered in oriental bittersweet vines.
Benefits:
This is an unusual opportunity for students to participate in the creation of large scale sculpture, seeing through the project from initial ideas to completion. Students have the opportunity to engage in hands-on complex problem solving, and learn construction techniques.
I created a model for school staff and students to get an idea of what we would be creating together. The scale of the model is 1" = 1'. Students are creating slightly larger head models as another component to this project.
Creating the Structure
We placed pieces of the scale model on the overhead projector and traced the outline of the image onto trace paper. We then laid the trace paper onto 4' x 8' plywood sheets and marked out the forms.
We put in the shelves, and made them level and firmly attached to the structure.
Filling in the details
On January 26 the structure of the head was complete, and we had a meeting with the students to talk about the next phase of the project - filling it in with details. The depth of the structure made us think of what goes on in a person's head - and we decided that we wanted to show what that is, rather than simply creating a "skin" to cover the structure.
The different levels of the structure become "shelves" that students can fill in with art that relates to our themes "What are we blind to? What are we blinded by?" During our discussion, students came up with ideas that I formed into guiding questions to keep the focus of the project. This is shown in the diagram below, which also shows the regions of the head that students will choose to build out. One side will be a boy and one will be a girl. Ideas for things to fill in include a brain, earrings, nostrils, veins, eyeballs, memories, and paths.
The different levels of the structure become "shelves" that students can fill in with art that relates to our themes "What are we blind to? What are we blinded by?" During our discussion, students came up with ideas that I formed into guiding questions to keep the focus of the project. This is shown in the diagram below, which also shows the regions of the head that students will choose to build out. One side will be a boy and one will be a girl. Ideas for things to fill in include a brain, earrings, nostrils, veins, eyeballs, memories, and paths.
Sanding and priming the plywood structure
Making the "skin"
Students participated in a couple workshops to create loops with oriental bittersweet vines to contribute to the "skin". The loops are attached in honeycomb shapes and then those shapes are attached to each other and then hung onto the structure. Here the face is shown with the skin in progress. It will take about 800 loops to cover just the face.