Wire Quilts

My students love to hear stories about the lives of the Quilters of Gee's Bend, Alabama. Their quilting knowlege was handed down from mothers to daughters since before the civil war. They just wanted to keep their children warm with scraps of worn out clothing, but their aesthetics were similar to those of modernist painting giants. Once someone recognized the aesthetic value, they were exhibiting their work in museums across the country. The majority of the talent in the world goes unnoticed, but it is not the fame that makes something beautiful. It's the work itself, and of course, the love that goes into it.

After talking the purpose and construction of real quilts, each student started making their own quilt squares to contribute to a class quilt, except this one would be made from metal.

How to fill a square? It was a problem to be solved, and the room was full of solutions: wire, pipe cleaners, beads, buttons, tape, upholstery swatches; if we had it, they could use it. Students chatted about their day as they twisted and taped, and strung things together. This isn't the kind of quilt you'd want to curl up in, but I hope the process gave my students a sense of how communities come together in the form of quilting bees. 

Analogous Painted Box Tactile Sculpture

 

What can you do with an old coffee table top and a bunch of tiny boxes handed to you in a garbage bag? Make a relief sculpture for a color theory lesson of course!

For this project, students painted the boxes on one side of the color wheel, ranging from pink to green. Students mixed yellow with the pink and yellow with some blue so that most of the colors were warm and cheerful.

Students needed vision to mix the colors but didn't need any vision to feel whether or not their box was covered with paint. We all worked together to finish 135 boxes in 9 rows of 15. The coffee table had a light spray paint coverage with blacks so that some of the old scratches were covered.

Then we used masking tape to make rows and light up the squares.

It was nothing short of a miracle that the width of the tape on each age, and a tape widths between each row and column worked out to fill the space exactly.  It was a real win for the power of eye-balling and guess work. We were just guessing how many boxes we'd need. It took two people to light up the ends of the tape on either side of a box. We didn't use rulers to measure, just the width of a box.

I glued the bottoms down with hot glue and now we have a tactile sculpture that we can use to discuss things like: rectilinear shapes, crystalographic balance, analogous color schemes, and high intensity. 

History of Architecture Totem Pole

The sensory garden at the Academy for the Blind is a place where "orientation and mobility" training can take place, as students have to navigate paths that go from brick to pebbles, to mulch. There are wind chimes, and the smells of pine and rosemary. But there wasn't much to touch there until a four years ago, when my students each made a part of our Georgia totem pole, displaying the state bird, flower, fish, reptile , motto, map, and more!

Two years ago, we added a school spirit pole, complete with braille I LOVE GAB, a Perkins Brailler, white canes, our school mascot, and glasses. We even had an un-vailing ceremony with drummers, cheerleaders, a speech about the symbolism of the piece.

This year, my students were studying architecture and each one picked a famous building from art history to write about. Then they creatd a 3D version in clay, with a clay cylinder through the center of each sculpture. These were then strung on a metal pole in the ground, filled with Great Stuff, that foams and hardens. We piped caulk between each layer to keep moisture and bugs out.

I've spotted students feeling the pole and trying to guess the name of each famous building: From the pyramids to the Guggenheim.