This story starts at the beginning of the fall semester. My Sculpture 3 class is set up to allow students to begin working much more independently. I do not give them specific assignments unless they ask. At this level, I’m interested in students pursuing their own interests in terms of materials, processes and conceptual development. In August, I told my students to share their ideas and to get started. Typically, a student in that class will do some experimentation and take a good chunk of the semester to complete their first project. Then they’ll smell the end of the semester coming and they’ll rush to complete one or two more projects.
When these students shared their ideas, they were all at different places with different interests. I love taking an individual approach in the studio, so this was fine with me. One student in this class, we’ll call her “Elena”*, showed me a rough sketch of a full body self-portrait and told me she wanted to learn how to make it out of steel. This was a good challenge for her and it was going to push the skills she had previously developed. However, the idea she explained was probably too difficult for her to pull off with the complex form she drew.
In my teaching brain, I’m always trying to think a few weeks ahead. I could easily imagine her starting this project, realizing it was not really possible to complete and then shifting it into something else that could also be a good experience and produce a good product. I saw a few options in my head and quickly decided to greenlight the project idea. She smiled, went away and got started.
Weeks went by and the sculpture developed slowly. I’m impatient. I am sort of notorious for checking in on students by yelling at them to work more and spend more time in the studio. I can usually hear the eye rolls as I shout over the studio noise. This particular student is pretty sassy and independent. She would just look at me, smile and say, “I know, I know.” After another couple of weeks and a lot of hours on her part, the outline of the form was complete and she had started filling in the surface of the form with lots of steel lines.
Essentially, she was creating mid-lines on all of her body parts and using lots of closely spaced steel lines to imply the surface of skin. Not only was it extremely difficult to get the mid-lines accurate, but it was almost mind-numbing to think about filling in all those tiny lines. Each tiny line had to be bent into a complex curve and fit her body exactly. Each line took a long time but she was rising to the challenge.
More weeks ticked by. Though she didn’t have a lot completed, what she had was looking so good that I didn’t want to steer her in a different direction. In addition to being pretty sassy, she’s also pretty stubborn so she probably wouldn’t have quit if I told her to. Looking ahead, I started to wonder if she would be able to finish the project by the end of the semester. When I hinted at this, she bucked. “It will be finished!” I backed off. If she did finish it, the project would likely be so good that it would easily account for a semester of studio and class hours.
Each December we get a cool opportunity through a regional art museum in North Carolina that allows faculty members to choose a student’s work to pair with their own work and enter into a juried exhibit. The exhibit highlights the power of mentorship and focuses on the student-teacher relationship. In the past, I’ve selected students who made great work and could benefit from the mental boost of being chosen. It’s a pretty competitive exhibit that features some of the biggest art department names in the country. This year I started thinking ahead to this exhibit and considering who I might ask. When Elena popped up in my final considerations, I saw another opportunity wrapped in this one.
If I could get Elena to agree to enter the exhibit, she would have to be finished by Dec 6 to meet the deadline. It wasn’t super possible in my head, but there was a chance. This would get her project finished by the end of the semester. The risk was that she could also get frustrated by the almost impossible challenge and give up.
Still, there was another issue to conquer. I would need to make something new to enter with her project. I usually enter a steel sculpture of mine and choose a sculpture from a student. So much of this semester had involved Elena and I looking closely at a handful of reference photos she was using to create her sculpture. So closely that we knew how far her ears were from the mid-point of her skull and how thick each toe was. Looking at these details was less like looking at a human form and more like analyzing an image like a blueprint.
One morning, I was running in the dark at 6:00 am and the idea came to me. I could draw Elena using one of her reference photos. For months, I had been wanting to use a person I knew for the subject of one of my drawings. I wanted to use a particular pose and use them as the shape of the wood I draw on. Then I would keep parts of their portrait and add other imagery to create the narrative. Asking someone I knew if I could draw them seemed like a huge thing to me, but here was an opportunity. I just had no idea if she would agree to any of it.
Several hours later, Elena was sitting in my office with a few other students. This happens a few mornings each week. My office is a bit of a gathering place where I want students to feel comfortable. The project came up and I told Elena about the opportunity and my crazy idea. She smiled, but that didn’t tell me anything. Sometimes she smiles when she’s about to tell you to go jump off a cliff. Sometimes she smiles when she’s uncomfortable and doesn’t know how to tell you to jump off a cliff in a nice way. Sometimes she probably also smiles because she’s happy. I just never know.
She thought about it for a bit before saying something that knocked me back on my heels a little. She had recently listened to an artist talk I gave where I happened to mention that I was hoping to get up the courage to ask people I knew if I could draw them in the near future. I barely remember saying it as I talked about my latest drawings of random internet strangers, but she smiled and said, “Well, yeah, we should do it. You were just talking about how you wanted to draw people you know and how that would be a new challenge.”
So we agreed to the challenge. She would have about a week and a half to finish about 70% of her sculpture. I would have the same time to start and finish a new drawing that scared the heck out of me.
It was best for me to not think about it and just get started. I spent that afternoon cutting out the wood and preparing it for drawing. As I traced and cut the wood in the studio, Elena was on the other side of the room bending steel.
Thanksgiving Break gave me a lot of hours to dedicate to the drawing. Since family dinners and events do not happen in the Sculpture Studio, Elena did not make as much progress over the break. When she returned, she was focused and basically lived in the studio. As the days went by, I finished the drawing and she worked even more furiously on her sculpture.
The deadline for her to finish her sculpture was Saturday, Dec 6. When I left campus on the night of Thursday, Dec 4, she had clear instructions and a plan for her weekend. She would finish the sculpture, clean it, document it with photos and email those photos to me by midnight Dec 6. When I looked in my teacher crystal ball, I wasn’t sure she would finish it all on time. I could see many scenarios where she became too exhausted and had to stop working. I could also see many scenarios where she would run into problems she didn’t know how to solve and forward motion would come to a halt. When I left on Thursday night, I told her to let me know if she needed me to come back to help her on Friday. I meant it, but I knew as I said it what the smile on her face meant that time. She said “OK” but her smile said, “I don’t ask for help, I can do it on my own, thanks.”
Most of Friday, Dec 5, I was in Columbia, about 1.5 hours away from the Sculpture Studio. I got a couple of updates and questions from Elena. Another student we’ll call “Jenna” was working to finish a sculpture in the studio and she was also acting as Elena’s helper and hype-man. Jenna provided her own updates. When I was leaving Columbia in the mid-afternoon, Elena texted that she was getting frustrated. I asked if she wanted me to come to the studio and she replied “Yes”. When a stubborn, independent student asks for help, you don’t question it, you just drive to campus.
The funny thing is, Elena knew what was wrong with the sculpture and also knew what she needed to do to fix it. I was able to get some supplies for Jenna and spend a few hours giving moral support to Elena before leaving them both working in the studio. I told Elena I would come back on Saturday if needed. She smiled.
Saturday afternoon, I decided not to ask if they wanted me to come to the studio. I just told them. They let me pick up a pizza and when I arrived, I saw that Elena had solved some big problems and made significant progress. I looked at all the spots she had left to fill in and started doing the math. It was going to be pushing it to finish, but it was possible. Elena kept smiling but it was obvious that the multiple 12+ hour studio days in a row were catching up with her. She was exhausted and her knees were killing her from getting on the floor and standing back up so many times. Still, she had a challenge to meet. She wouldn’t stop.
During the afternoon, I cut out a new piece of wood for an upcoming drawing and got it prepped. I annoyed Jenna and took care of a few other things left undone from the previous week. I peppered in some encouragement to Elena and tried to stay out of her way. Time raced by and the sun set so fast that we missed the cool view from the studio loading dock. Before we knew it, Elena was putting on the last few steel lines and Jenna and I were prepping the documentation area to take some photos.
As Elena tuned off the welder, we celebrated with some cheers and quickly grabbed the sculpture and carried it off to the documentation wall. A few minutes later, I was dropping the photos in the juried exhibit entry and tapping “send”. One of Elena’s favorite things to say is, “Oh my lanta!” as an exclamation of surprise, disgust, disbelief or frustration. I think I heard her say it a hundred times this weekend. When I asked what she wanted the title to be, the answer seemed obvious.
At 7:00 pm on Saturday, Dec 6, the project was finished and we had entered the exhibit. Both of us had found an artistic challenge and both of us rose to meet that challenge.
Should I have waved Elena off of the project months ago and provided different material and process experiences for her this semester? A lot of teachers would have. Should I have been honest with her in August and told her it probably wasn’t possible for her to complete her idea in the time we had? Many teachers would.
I’m learning that if you don’t tell students things are impossible, they’ll actually do them. I’m learning that sometimes Elena’s smile means you should go jump off a cliff and sometimes it means “thank you”. I’m also learning that sometimes a student can challenge you as much as you challenge them.
Now to get Jenna to finish her sculpture!
*Elena approved this post. Jenna did not.
