Art in the garden - art project

This wasn't just your garden-variety assignment, and my students gleaned quite a bit about shape, form, color, sensation of texture, and sculpture principles.

My beginning art students, mostly freshmen, have a unit we like to call "functional ceramics." In this segment of the second semester of our introductory art courses, we work with a variety of materials. In this case, I wanted to revisit the sculpture unit that this group did in the first semester, and satisfy our goals for this class by combining the idea of a functional clay piece with sculptural concepts.

I love the fall season. I also enjoy ceramic and porcelain vessels that have the shapes of gourds, vegetables and the like. In fact, I have made several pieces for myself, so I have quite a number of good examples to share with my students. I also brought in actual vegetables: acorn squash, butternut squash, artichokes, red, green and yellow peppers, eggplant and several others with which even I wasn't familiar.

The students were asked to bring in large colorful photographs of vegetables that would apply to this assignment, and I brought in several books from my local library that had illustrations to help us with color during this assignment, since some of the vegetables didn't last long in the varied temperature of the classroom.

I demonstrated for my class by creating a large acorn squash that I wanted to paint a variegated dark green with a suggestion of orange-yellow. An ashy-brown stem would eventually serve as a handle for the top. Since these pieces had to be functional and become containers for something, the students had to choose their vegetable with this requirement in mind. As I demonstrated, I used clay in its plastic form, giving me a great opportunity to reiterate the stages that clay goes through: the first stage beings its malleable form ("plasticity" being the term used); then leatherhard; bone dry (or "greenware"); bisque fired; and, lastly, glazed (fired).

For this assignment, we were not going to do a second or "glaze" firing because of the large number of classes creating ceramic pieces and the resulting drain on the kilns--not to mention the time the teacher spends loading and unloading the kilns. In addition, because I wanted the students to capture certain colors and textures that cannot be achieved by beginners with electric kilns, I had the students use acrylic paint after the bisque firing to achieve that end.

There was a nice tie-in with previously taught information and skills, as the students had just finished a big oil-painting assignment in which they learned to mix color and achieve certain tactile appearances with the paint. This was a further attempt, on my part, to drive these skills home through reinforcement.

During my demonstration, I took a 16-inch "softball" of clay, and sculpted it according to the actual squash and/or illustrations. I made sure the shoulders around the stems were the rounded shape they are in reality. I added the stem and loosely covered the clay with a plastic bag.

For demonstrations, I always make sure I have the clay examples in different stages so the kids don't get bored or forget the entire process. So, in another bag, I had created another small gourd that had the look of those tiny pumpkins, but I was going to complete this one to be a celadon color and use it as a tiny vase for a small grapevine and bittersweet.

This little piece was leather-hard, which means that it had been sculpted and was allowed to "set up" so that it was dried out just enough to be able to be picked up without changing its shape. I was now able to demonstrate the next step in this assignment: cutting it through laterally with a wire or knife, digging out the interior with a loop tool, smoothing the inside, scoring and slipping the two edges, and reattaching the two halves.

The piece was allowed to completely dry, was then fired, and finally painted with acrylics. A few of the pieces were later sprayed with a polymer varnish, if the actual fruit or vegetable had a glossy surface.

These little sculptures are so colorful and delightful. When I displayed them with garden tools, bushel baskets and clay garden pots, everyone came to view the garden we made with art.

MATERIALS

* Clay earthenware

* Clay tools

* Access to a kiln

* Acrylic paints and paintbrushes

* Real vegetables or great photos for color

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Students will ...

* learn terminology specifically for sculpture, ceramics and color.

* learn how to create a shape that becomes three-dimensional out of clay.

* understand the concepts of addition and subtraction while sculpting in clay.

* understand how clay's molecular make-up changes during firing.

* learn how to mix various acrylic colors to mimic those colors found in nature.

* efficiently set up and clean up their work stations.

Geri Greenman is head of the art department at Willowbrook High School in Villa Park, Illinois.

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