HIGH SCHOOL g n i t p Scul HUNGER AWARENESS ing class to research and were very surprised by what they learned. Sculpting Food with Wire Students sculpted wire food with a placemat that had their hunger fact written on it. They used stovepipe the sharp ends by making a tiny curl. I created wire food samples in advance to show students that I wanted them to work with form, not shape. Students tend to make flat shapes with wire, essentially a wire drawing. Creating some basic forms from wire were good exercises. We made spheres by interlocking two circles. Then we bent those spheres to create apples, pears, and other sphere-like foods. A raised coil was great for representing whipped cream or mashed potatoes. Students made noodles by wrapping wire around a ½" (1.25 cm) dowel to create a spring, then cutting that into seg-ments. All of this wirework will give students’ hands a patina, so a sink for cleanup is important. A Banquet of Facts When the food was sculpted, I offered a placemat template for students to use as a sample. I used the thickness of a ruler to draw two lines from each edge. Students wrote their facts about hunger in red marker between the lines and outlined them in black permanent marker. This added uni-formity to the work for our exhibi-tion; the display was to look like a banquet. Each placemat had its own unique fact. If students’ facts were too short to go all the way around the placemat, I encouraged them to add personal messages or state-ments reflecting on their research. Transporting and Displaying We used tiny drops of strong mul-tipurpose glue to attach the wire to the placemats to make them easy to display and transport. For sculpted noodle dishes, we glued everything but those, and students put the individual noodles in a paper cup to transport CONTINUED ON PAGE 41. I Eric Gibbons always start my high-school sculp-ture students with wire. I like to begin with simple elements such as line and build from there. In the past, I have had students construct self-portraits and emboss wire images into paper with a small press, but this year, I wanted to challenge them with something different. I asked each student to research five facts about U.S. or global hun-ger. They had to dig deep because all forty-five students each needed a unique fact. They each wrote one of their five facts on a list so we knew there would be no repeats. Students used their smartphones dur-The wire makes the food ghost-like and helps the hunger theme hit home. wire for the food and aluminum wire for the place setting and cut the wire with simple needle nose pliers. Once the wire was cut, students blunted A banquet of sculptures with placemats containing facts about U.S. and global hunger. 34 JANUARY 2020 SchoolArts
School Arts Magazine January 2020: Page 36
