IB Art I: Creating an Empowering Collaborative Sculpture
My IB Art I class was tasked with creating a sculpture using paper pulp that would make the whole class feel empowered.
Prior to beginning this assignment, I gave a presentation that highlighted the life and work of Niki de Saint Phalle. Her work focused primarily on empowering the female form, so I decided to use this concept to inspire my students to create work that would make them feel good about themselves.
I wanted my students to have the opportunity to choose their own sculptural design as a class, so after the presentation they were allowed to begin the brainstorming process.
After a noisy 10 minutes, the class finally came up with the idea of creating flowers. The class had previously torn up a bunch of old projects and recyclable paper to make the paper pulp for their projects, so there was enough pulp for students to create a fairly large sculpture. The students had never worked with paper pulp before, so it was a new experience for them (and it turns out a challenge as well).
My main intention for this class project was to give the students an opportunity to experiment and work in the three dimensional realm. It was difficult at first to convince them to even touch the pulp (if you haven’t before, it’s blended paper, water, and glue so it’s pretty mushy). Once they got past their reservations, though, they created an intriguing collaborative sculpture that surprised me.
I was especially impressed by the students who added pistachio shells, and the detail that they achieved using them.
