Screw Art

To go with my theme of "building a great school year," I wanted to teach my students the kind of tools they can use for home improvement projects. Most schools have a core curriculum but students, who are blind, are required to learn an expanded core curriculum that may include Braille, orientation and mobility, cooking, or career exploration...every day living skills that most people learn through observation. I wanted to let my students use a drill to make holes or put screws into wood. Even if they never do it themselves, at least they all know what people are talking about when they reference drills and screws in the future.  For this project, they painted a piece of wood a solid color, painted a black shape on it (most students were thinking in terms of typography), fill the shape with holes, fill the holes with screws, and finally paint the screw heads. It's a simple concept: practice a skill and end up with a tactile piece of art that really pops.

Screw Art

I recently discovered an inspiring 5 minute video called, "Please Touch the Art"  about artist, Andrew Meyers making a tactile portrait from screws, for a blind man named, George. 

https://vimeo.com/166149898

After looking at more work by Meyers, I decided that this would be something that my blind students could not only appreciate, but create.

They each began by drawing a shape onto a piece of wood, and creating a grid of 1/2" squares. 

Then they made holes at each intersection with a drill or nail, before painting the shape black and the background a different color. Screws were drilled into the holes. Some students chose to try to have all the screw heads at the same height, while others tried to create curves or rounded shapes by varying the height.







Finally the heads of the screws were painted. Half an inch apart was not as close as I would have liked to have placed the screws, but each student was allotted about 50 screws, so they did what they could to fill the space.  One student who is totally blind, felt a piece progress and said, "There's the 'A'"  I didn't even know she knew the shapes of print letters, since she is a Braille reader. It was gratifying to teach my students how to use sandpaper, hammer, and drill, not just once or twice, enough times to actually gain some confidence in a life skill that they wouldn't have learned from observation.