Aggregate—Collage and Found Object Sculpture
SCHOOL PROGRAM LESSON PLAN–7 to 9
Aggregate—Collage and Found Object Sculpture
Final Project Description:
A small abstract sculpture.
Description:
What ideas and identities do objects contain? Can we alter these ideas through manipulation of the objects? Using pieces of clay, sections of images cut from magazines, glue, wooden dowels, and mundane found objects such as elastic bands, paper clips and polystyrene balls, students will reshape, stack, paint, glue and manipulate to create small abstract sculptures.
**NOTE: Making something weird and abstract will likely be really hard for most kids in this age group. Be supportive and encouraging but still push them into that uncomfortable zone where artists make the best work. If it feels hard, it is probably worth doing.
Curriculum connections:
Visual Arts: Create images using metamorphosis, juxtaposition, distortion and exaggeration.
English Language Arts: Express ideas in a variety of forms to explore and respond.
Workshop Duration: 90 minutes
In Gallery: 15 minutes after the tour for discussion
In Studio: 5 minutes for instructions, 55 minutes to build their sculptures, 15 minutes to clean up and discuss each other’s work.
Prep:
· Set up a supply table for the kids to choose their own materials from
· Cover the tables with paper – this one is going to be messy
Materials:
Air dry clay
magazines
scissors
clay tools
wooden dowels
glue sticks
white glue
paint – acrylic, house paint and gesso
polystyrene balls
pins
little cups for paint / glue
paint brushes of varying sizes
various odds and ends – scraps of wood, metal, office supplies, etc.
masking tape
markers
Before students begin, have them write their name on a piece of masking tape to attach to the bottom of their sculpture.
Discussion:
10:30 – 10:45
End the exhibition tour by looking at Kelly Lycan’s installation, More Than Anything. Read through Lycan’s artist statement (last page of this lesson) and parse out the salient details for the students.
Lycan is interested in conventions of display: get the students to look and think about how objects are on display here now, compared with other museum or gallery experiences.
Gallery and museum display are usually rendered as inconspicuous as possible functioning as invisible backgrounds but our experience of this décor is very relevant. Wall colour and texture, lighting, display apparatus, furnishing, ceiling height and floor covering all affect our viewing experience.
Kelly Lycan is also thinking about the objects and the things – what meanings are encoded into them and how can those meanings be altered through recombination, assemblage, addition and subtraction.
The objects are mostly disposable take-out containers and buried knick-knacks turned into sculptures. The take-out containers once briefly of service have their function neutered, their value is repurposed on the plinth; they become “things” and “objects of art” in the context of the gallery. The thrift store knick-knacks are barely discernible lost in material and form, rendering them more useless then they were before. The plinths also lose their encoded value they shift from pedestal to subject, supports of artwork to artwork themselves.
Get the students to examine Lycan’s installation and try to draw them into a discussion.
Explain to the students that they will now head back to the studio to build their own abstract sculptures.
Instructions and Creation:
10:45 – 11:45
1. Ask the students to begin by selecting some items that interest them from the supply table – what they build and how they build it is entirely up to them. Encourage them to consider what they have just seen in the gallery and the ideas that you discussed. Help as needed.
Review:
11:45 – 12:00
Ask the students to place their completed sculpture on a clean table at the back of the room and clean up their stations. Once everyone is cleaned up, have the students look at each other’s works and discuss. How did the students find the process? What was difficult, interesting, dull, fun? What do they find interesting about the work of their peers?
More Than Anything
I investigate the way objects are placed and displayed in the world and the cycle of value and exchange they go through. Re-purposing and re-contextualizing ordinary things is a consistent part of my practice. I research the distinctions between experience and reproduction translating this through sculpture and photography while referencing collections and methods of display found in museums, institutional gift shops, cheap retail stores, or high-end department stores. I reinterpret and reassemble various high and low objects through strategies of exhibition, blurring the distinction between content and style, production and mass-consumption, and originals verses copies. These ideas create composites of vernacular collections, art history, contemporary art and design; paradigms collide revealing similarities, influences and failures. Not only do I want to address the medium of photography but also a shifting of identity between sculpture, painting and photography.
Gallery and museum display are usually rendered as inconspicuous as possible functioning as invisible backgrounds but our experience of this décor is very relevant. Wall colour and texture, lighting, display apparatus, furnishing, ceiling height and floor covering all affect our viewing experience. Recent exhibitions have addressed this background by reproducing historic exhibition spaces within the existing galleries; creating places for the display of artwork as the artwork itself.
For Ideas and Things the installation titled More Than Anything focuses on structures that hold up the objects. The work is about more than the thing, it is the presentation of the thing and desire, as the title suggests. The floor of the long narrow gallery space is covered with dry wall, which enhances the intended monochrome environment. Some of the display units or plinths are also fabricated out of drywall and appear to be generated from the gallery floor and wall. Shelves cut out of sheets of drywall but left empty reference the museological configuration of items like snuff bottles or ancient figures. The lack of objects on these large shelves relies on the viewer to fill in the blanks.
A crowd of plinths occupy one end of the gallery space, their scale relate to the body a human-object interaction transpires. The objects are mostly disposable take-out containers and buried knick-knacks turned into sculptures. The take-out containers once briefly of service have their function neutered, their value is repurposed on the plinth; they become “things” and “objects of art” in the context of the gallery. The thrift store knick-knacks are barely discernible lost in material and form, rendering them more useless then they were before. The plinths also lose their encoded value they shift from pedestal to subject, supports of artwork to artwork themselves.