Shipping Tape Sculptures

I've been thinking about doing a packaging-tape-figurative-sculpture project for a couple years, but something was stopping me. Was it the fear of failure?  The fear of cutting a student, while trying to get the tape off of them?  Was it the pain of filling out a purchase request for a bunch of packing tape?  Yes, yes, and especially yes.

In the end, I caved, and the students really enjoyed working on it.  We did each figure part by part. First we had a volunteer to be the legs. We wrapped her in packing tape, as though we were bandaging her. A couple layers sticky side out, and then a couple layers sticky side in meant there was no sticky anywhere. I slid my finger around the ankle to make room for scissors and the cut up the side of each leg, releasing the student.

Then we taped the cut seams back up. We had someone else be the torso, and got volunteers for hands and feet.  The only problem  was the head. No one wanted their head taped up even with the nose left open, and I was afraid of cutting someone's hair by accident. So we used a clay head that a student had made a couple years ago. It seemed to be the right size.

I used about 4 rolls of tape for each figure. The first brand I used was Scotch. Next, I used Duck brand which tore too easily. And when I ran out of that I got a couple rolls of Staples brand, which was by far the strongest. I wish I had started with that for stiffer forms.

If we were in a normal school, I would stand our sculptures in a lobby or hallway, but with blind students running into them, knocking them down, or stepping on them, I knew they wouldn't last a week. So I kept them in my classroom, over a counter, and hanging from the ceiling by one hand.

Some students dubbed the figures "creepy" while others playfully fantasized with me about the kinds of things  we could use tho fill them and how that would change the interpretation: lights, gum balls, cotton candy. In fact, we did end up cutting an incision or two into one of the sculptures to insert Christmas lights, and it created a completely different mood. There are so many possibilities.