Yarn made from old clothes
We get going pretty quickly. First, the young artists formed their groups by drawing their name tags out of box. I did a quick demo on how to make “yarn” from old clothes, and they got to work.
Hideous fabric can sometimes make the best yarn
After that, I put them through an onslaught of images in a “slide show” (I can’t stop calling it that) of Eco artists, site-specific installations, DIY projects, guerrilla art, and Craftivism. I’ll be posting links to all the artists I shared with them in the blog roll. A lot of these movements have overlapping concerns, and I want these students to grasp that just by taking the time to make something by hand, they are making a statement. They also have been given a really strong platform to express their ideas, working in public at a state park. Most important to me is that they also understand they don’t have to interject a message artificially into their work, that just by getting the viewer to slow down, observe their surrounding, to experience the site in an alternative way, that is enough and important.
Then the collectives met and were coming up with fantastic ideas, even before we had been to the site! I was blown away. Sketches were happening even before I could make the suggestion that they would be a good idea!
