A sixth-grade creation

Starting last week, I began the next art project at the elementary school in Tacacorí. After learning that over time the papier-mâché creations succumbed to the Central Valley’s relative humidity and became difficult to preserve, I decided to find a more solid medium. I liked the idea of recycled plastic bottles from the hotel but I worried about the extensive use of scissors they’d require and all the sharp plastic edges that would be created in the process. Instead, I went with the option that, although not exactly recycled, at least doesn’t require industrially-created materials and is fairly abundant: rocks. And the best part is that stone is impervious to humidity (on the scale of time that we’re thinking about).

Fifth-grade creations — some kids pasted paper versions of their bird on the rock.

In the slideshow below, you can see some of the fifth- and sixth-graders’ works of art revolving around birds. As always, I’m really impressed with abilities of kids with little formal artistic training and I like the creative ways in which they were able to use the irregular surface and shape of the rocks — some of which I supplied and some of which they remembered to find and bring — as a canvas!

this one is still missing the bird!

I’m hoping that after a week or two we can get every student at the school to have created a rock, and then maybe we can collect them all to make a mosaic on school grounds somewhere, at least temporarily!