In 2023, I was picked to be part of a ReMake Learning Moonshot Grant jointly written by IU1 and Pittsburgh Center for Arts and Media. From the grant proposal: Intermediate Unit 1 (IU1) envisions a future where high-tech hands-on learning is valued and recognized for its impact on students, especially in rural schools. To make that future a reality, IU1 will partner with Pittsburgh Center for Arts and Media to launch a residency program that will pair working artists with digital fabrication teachers to create unique hands-on learning experiences for students in five school districts in Greene County. With fellow teaching artist and papermaker/printmaker, Katy DeMent, we would undertake a mini (five-session) residency in each of the elementary schools in the county over the 2023-2024 school year. We were extraordinarily lucky to have also been paired with IU1 Fab Lab instructor Rebecca Reeb, who was an invaluable collaborator to the project, serving as a sounding board, idea translator, co-experimenter, and head of all tech support and troubleshooting. You can learn more about all the projects on PCA&M’s website. (Full disclosure, as a part-time staff member at PCA&M, I write most of the content for the off-site programming that happens through Artists in Schools & Communities, so I’ve reused some of the same copy that I originally wrote.) This is post 1/3 about this trio of projects.
My pilot project was a collaboration with Casey Robinson, who teaches art K-12 across the entire West Greene School District. We met with Rebecca Reeb, Katy DeMent, and Katy’s collaborating teacher, Rachael Kelly (Waynesburg Central Elementary School), for a professional development day, where we learned about the IU1’s Fab Lab capabilities, experimented, and designed and planned projects together. With the help of the other IU1 Fab Lab staff, we created laser cut wood pieces with CorelDRAW and learned that you could use acylic paint to add color to the wood before laser cutting it. With recycling as a main theme of my own art practice, I was intrigued by the negative-space scrap material left in the Fab Lab and Casey and I decided to make its reuse one of our main themes in the project with her two third grade classes. We also discovered that the laser-cut wood could be etched and used as a printing block. Casey was a wonderful collaborator and game to experiment with different ways we could use these materials and incorporate them together.
The creative steps the students undertook included:
Creating a simple shape that would be cut from a 5x5” piece of wood and painting background colors for that wood.
Translating the students’ Sharpie drawings into digital files with cutting and etching lines (ALL REBECCA!)
Using the positive cut-out shape as a stamping and using the negative as a stencil for mixed-media paper pieces on painted paper and on acetate. Most of the art was used for our installations but the work on paper became a take-home memento for the students.
Collaboratively painting large wood negatives for a trio of sculptures, then layering them with printed acetates and assembling them into three-sided lantern shapes with colorful zip-ties.
Collaboratively assembling personal wood negatives with more colorful plexiglas Fab Lab scrap for another pair of panels to be installed in the school.
