2.23.14 Day 3 with Sally Glass

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. Sally connected Long’s and Goldsworthy’s work to our current exhibition FOCUS: Fred Tomaselli. In some of his work, Tomaselli uses images of subjects from nature to create abstract patterns that evoke a multitude of associations, such as rosary beads or sound waves, but that cannot be pinned down.

After the lecture, the teens headed to the studio, where they prepped pieces of paper for the project by painting them black.

Then it was off to the galleries where we viewed Tomaselli’s Breathing Head, 2002, and Flipper, 2008. We discussed the vibrant patterning within the works and the ideas that they conjured. Sally explained that the students were going to create a large-scale collaborative work by combining individual modules of collage inspired by these two pieces.

The students’ task for the day was to search for interesting imagery from a wide variety of printed source material and to cut out elements they found interesting.

Toward the end of class, the group convened and collectively decided what overall patterns would tie the individual collages together. Once the students were in agreement, they drew the patterns over a paper grid in preparation for next class.