Features

Students show off their wearable art

Students at Edmonds Elementary turned into clay-sculpting Picassos earlier this month with the help of a resident artist.

Sculptor Greg Delaney, of Seattle, spent three days from Jan. 6-8 teaching the school’s 320 students to sculpt tiny, abstract faces using clay and knickknacks, which he calls found-object faces.

The art project was funded with a grant from the STARS Foundation’s Artist in Residence program. STARS supports the teaching of art, reading, science and technology at Edmonds Elementary.

Some 600 sculptures are now on display in the school’s library.

“It was a brilliantly crafted experience,” said parent volunteer Carol Davies, who applied for the grant.  “When we saw all of the faces together on trays to be fired, we were stunned by the impact.”

Students from kindergarten to sixth grade were asked to collect found objects no bigger than a penny from around the house – like nuts, bolts, screws, beads, charms and chains – to then use as the eyes, noses, mouths, hats and hair of their faces. 

Delaney supplied students with half-ounces of polymer clay in lots of fun colors, and taught them how to sculpt the basic features and expressions of a face with the clay.

Once they had a feel for the technique, Delaney told the students to squish their faces and sculpt them again.

“I like to teach kids that the freedom in creating any kind of art is the freedom to make a mistake and start over,” Delaney said.  “You have to get passed trying to make it perfect the first time, because you really can’t, and that’s not important.

“What’s important is you getting a mastery or some kind of control over your materials, so that you may not be doing it perfectly, but you’re doing what you want to do with it and finding out how to do it your way.”

Third grader Marina Pierce had fun incorporating found objects into her sculptures.  She used old earrings, rings and pins for the eyes, mouth and hair of one of her faces.

“The art project was really awesome,” she said.  “We got to sculpt with clay, which we never get to do in school, and it was fun because we got to make faces with different emotions and different stories behind [them].”

Fourth grader Corrina Davies used feathers, jewels, bobby pins and colored wires to create a crown for one of her faces.  She said sculpting the faces was like “letting your imagination out on a ball of clay.”

“It was really fun because you didn’t even have to think about what you were going to sculpt or what it was going to be about,” she said.  “You’d just grab a couple of nuts and bolts and knicks and knacks and just let your imagination out.”

The students were allowed to share their found objects, but they weren’t allowed to get up out of their seats and go searching for better knickknacks.  Delaney wanted them to learn how to work with what they had.

“Kids would look over and say, ‘Oh, look that guy got a marble’ or ‘That guy got a tiny pair of sunglasses, do you have another one of those?’ and I’d have to say, ‘No, but what do you have in front of you?’” Delaney said.

“I was trying to give them the tools to improvise, to say ‘This is what I have to work with and these are all the different things I can do with that.’  I wanted to give them a new set of tools for thinking about art and thinking about creativity.”

It was fun to watch students turn clay into characters with their own personalities as they added bits and pieces to their sculptures, Carol Davies said.

“The kids would look at their face and think it needs eyes, so they find some beads or bolts or screws to use for eyes,” she said.  “And then they go ‘Hmm, alright, maybe a hat’ and then ‘Oh he needs a thing coming out of his cheek because he’s so angry,’ and they kept building and creating and it was so great to watch it unfold.”

Delaney fired the faces in his oven – carefully gluing any knickknacks that threatened to fall off – and then glued a pin back onto each face, turning them into wearable art.

“These pieces were crazy Picasso cyborgs by the time they were done,” Delaney said of the students’ art. “Some of the creativity was just mindboggling, and sometimes I could see exactly what it was they were trying to say with their art.”