Paper Relief Sculptures with Joy

Joy continued the discussion of our theme "Going Green" by talking about environmental art. Joy did a great job of building on what the students have been learning so far about recycling and clean energy this semester. Joy expanded on this by bringing in new vocabulary related to our earth's natural resources, conservation and waist.

Joy then showed her students pictures of Robert Smithson's spiral jetty and got the kids thinking about how they could use a natural resource, or recycled material to create art. Joy introduced the idea of rolling newspaper to create a relief sculpture of shapes like the jetty shown above.

The kids got really excited about this project. Joy chose to have her kids create their piece on old matte board that was donated by a local frame show, so that the kids could really get into building without worrying that the paper would fall apart.

I was really pleased to see the kids run with this idea, some even building way up and and beyond the relief structure that Joy had suggested. Joy was great about allowing her students to explore, experiment and create with this great recycled material.