Sticking to it.

At the beginning of the school year, I like to focus on introductory, team-oriented problems that give me a chance to interact with my students. This year, I introduced installation art. I showed students prints of different examples of installation art and explained that artwork of this type is generally designed for a specific site. It is not intended as a permanent fixture and is recorded for posterity by means of photos, video, or drawings.

Students were asked to bring in a bundle of sticks that fit snugly into the crook of their arm, tied with string, and labeled with their name. I suggested picking up sticks from yards, parks, and roadsides. Students were asked not to remove live branches, and were encouraged to collect sticks of various thickness and length.

We examined photos of the horse sculptures of Deborah Butterfield, noting the materials she uses in her sculptures. We also discussed the simplification and abstraction in her building process, and the expressiveness of the finished creatures. I then confirmed what most students had already guessed--we were going to build our own animals with the sticks we had all collected.

Choosing the animal subject matter was easy. Northeast Nebraska has a wide variety of animal life, but the class decided that the most graceful animal in these parts was the white-tailed deer. So our installation would be a herd of deer. We researched photographs and started making thumbnail sketches, not as plans for the intended sculpture, but to become familiar with the shapes, proportions, and anatomical features of deer.

I assigned a working spot for each group in the lawn area outside our artroom. Each team was supplied with a 50-foot coil of stovepipe wire (19 gauge), a wire cutter, and a pair of pliers. We chose the ungalvanized wire, which will rust, because we intend the deer to return to nature.

Students started their armatures, forming a framework that looked like an elongated box with four legs, wiring securely at each intersection of the combined sticks. They created bridges that reinforced legs and added strength to the framework. Groups considered what their deer was doing--grazing, sniffing the wind, glancing behind--and how that affected the stance. They also had to consider how their deer would relate to other deer in the installation.

The challenge was choosing just the right sticks to suggest the form of the deer, while keeping in mind strength and stability. Students worked steadily--bundling, wiring, and weaving sticks into deer legs and torsos. They learned the importance of strategic wiring, finding that not all sticks needed to be wired if packed solidly and woven carefully. The mechanics of joint movement had to be explained and re-examined.

By the third class period, our deer jumped the magic hurdle. Students began to see the potential the art problem promised.

Before the bodies were fully filled in, students began working on necks and heads, weaving and interlocking sticks into the torso frame. I reminded students to step back periodically and study their sculpture from different viewpoints, evaluating the form and making necessary adjustments. They continued to add sticks to create muscle and bulk to round out the form. Details--ears, tail, antlers, eyes--were left until last and formed with brush, smaller sticks, chunks of branches, and other found materials.

After sticking it out for five days, we were ready to carry the deer to a grassy area behind our school. The site is adjacent to a junction where two highways meet at the edge of our town and has the advantage of never being mowed. We placed and staked deer in spots where they seemed to relate to each other's presence.

Installation completed, we spent our next art period making charcoal drawings of our newly formed herd of deer. The on-the-spot drawings were wonderfully textured, developed from layers of hatch lines. Students chose their most promising sketch and developed it into a finished drawing.

Community response to our resident herd of deer has been wonderful. The deer graze peacefully on the hillside. They will blend into the blazing golds and oranges of autumn, appear in sharp contrast to the knee-deep snow of winter, and be enlivened by the wild flowers of spring.

NATIONAL STANDARD

Students conceive and create works of visual art that demonstrate an understanding of how the communication of their ideas relate to the media, techniques, and processes they use.

Arllys Monson is an art instructor at Laurel-Concord High School in Laurel, Nebraska. [e-mail].