This Sunday was our last class with Sally Glass. For our project (directly inspired by FOCUS artist Fred Tomaselli’s work Flipper, 2008), students were given a piece of 20 x 30 inch paper that had been prepped during the previous class—each had been painted black, and the overall pattern of the project had been drawn on. Students continued to cut images they felt a connection to from magazines and newspapers. Everyone was given total freedom of source material. Once all of the collage elements were cut out, students applied their selections to their individual sheets of paper.

This Sunday, the teens were back with artist Sally Glass. Class began with a short lecture on artists Andy Goldsworthy and Richard Long. Goldsworthy uses nature as material to create temporary site-specific sculptures and installations, while Long uses his body to interact with nature in order to create a piece, such as walking back and forth across a field, which then creates a visible pattern on the ground.

This Sunday the students worked with Austin-based artist Jules Buck Jones. In preparation for the class, Jules installed a giant still life in the middle of the studio. The still life was composed of repurposed paintings and sculptures from some of Jules’s previous works configured into a mass that can best be described as a psychedelic jungle. Needless to say, the students were fairly curious about what Jules had planned for the day.

Sally began class with a short presentation about mandalas, a spiritual and ritual symbol in Hinduism and Buddhism that represents the universe. After a brief introduction to mandalas and their multifaceted religious and political meanings, Sally screened a short film about Tibetan Sand Mandalas, which are ritualistically destroyed after completion to indicate the fleeting nature of the material world.

This Sunday we met Sally Glass. Sally holds a BS in Psychology and Philosophy from TCU, and she is currently pursuing an MFA at the University of Texas at Dallas and is an artist-in-residence at CentralTrak. With a background in documentary and journalistic photography, Glass began her artistic practice with photographic abstractions and has recently evolved into object-making, sculptural installation, and performance.