Newspaper Sculpture

Newspaper sculptures courtesy of year 5 in the final week of school last year. Inspired by my previous Geometric Sculpture post. I might have art directed the bottom left one a little more than the others... They all looked great and were a really effective collaborative task.

Geometric Sculpture

This isn't exactly an 'art' post... it's more the genesis of an idea inspired by an exercise I did with a year 6 maths class. We were working on 3D shapes, and made these suspended sculptures using rolled up sheets of newspaper and masking tape. If time and chance allow, this idea could be extended to become an art lesson in itself—I'll let you know if I find the opportunity! But for the moment, here are some 'accidental' art pieces—rectangular, hexagonal and triangular pyramids.

Footsteps

This colourful artwork was made collaboratively by students from kindergarten to year 6. The children's feet were traced repeatedly until they covered the surface with overlapping shapes. Students from year 5 and 6 then used watercolour paint to colour the various resulting shapes. How many feet can you see?

Footsteps was inspired by their library theme of Empathy. The students were encouraged to practise "walking in another person's shoes". Imagining and trying to understand the experiences and feelings of others is a great life skill for all of us.

Fibre pen and watercolour on six cardboard panels.

Paula Scher-inspired NZ

These collaboratively made maps of New Zealand were inspired by American graphic designer and artist, Paula Scher. Year 3 viewed a collection of her beautiful map art here. The land mass of NZ is made up of hand written words all to do with ‘Aotearoa’ (Maori for Land of the Long White Cloud). The children took turns copying from a word bank of around a dozen words with permanent markers. Originally there was a light pencil outline to guide the writing which was later erased. The writing wasn’t particularly legible but the overall effect is great! 

I really like art that looks great on the wall at a distance but also seems to have laser beams that drag you in for a close-up look. It’s interesting to see all the different writing and words and the ways they zig and zag and tumble over each other.

The black and white one is my personal favourite and is inspired by New Zealand’s national sporting colours. The teacher of this particular class was on leave to compete in a hockey tournament in New Zealand so it seemed like a good opportunity to combine a quick geography lesson with some art. Apologies to any Kiwis reading this who have zoomed in close and feel that our word bank is stereotypical or too limited! In the future I would really like to try this lesson with an older class and let each student choose a country to research and make a Scher-like map of art for.