Arts Education Projects

This artwork is entitled “Line Drawings,” and is a collage of photographs of a hanging wire sculpture and the shadows it casts. I created this artwork to demonstrate that even when art is created for its own sake, it acts as a learning medium and teaches valuable lessons. 

 

I went into this piece focusing on the overall form and impression, thinking about how I wanted to create a hanging sculpture of wire with some bird imagery. As I created, several challenges emerged, including how to hang the sculpture such that I could take clear photos of it and how to light up, photograph, and present the final sculpture. I managed to hang the sculpture by creating a “tripod” of string taped to the walls and suspending the wire from that with a blank canvas behind it to act as a contrast. When deciding how exactly to photograph the piece, I experimented with shadow and light falling upon the wire, which created an almost illusion-like effect in the scene, where the wire and shadows appear to be kinds of line drawings upon the wall and canvas. I then amplified this illusion effect by creating a collage of the final pictures, where the wire and shadows are nearly indistinguishable, and the different photos seem to blend into each other. 

 

Though these problems and solutions at first glance seem to be specific to this piece of art, they teach much more: I considered my environment and the materials I had to hang the piece, thereby practicing my creativity and problem solving. I experimented with shadow and light and layout, thinking deeply about perspective and design and how these can be used to fulfill our aesthetic goals. 

 

This artwork wasn’t created to practice my creativity, problem solving, and perspective, but I learned and exercised these skills in the process, rendering this piece of “art for its own sake” into a “learning medium.”