I thought it might be time for a little update on my work with the Ohio State School for the Blind. Thanks to a TeachArts Ohio grant from the Ohio Arts Council, I’m at the school once a week, working on creating a timeline of the school’s history depicted on a series of banners.
These first couple months have been about deciding what events to choose, finding imagery to go along with them, making a banner mockup, and working with students on image transfer experiments so that we can decide what method to use for the final project. While it would be easy to just use an inkjet iron-on transfer, we wanted to get a little more creative, so we’re using gel medium (basically glue) to transfer a color copy to fabric, letting it dry, then wetting the back of the paper and peeling it off. The color copy pigments are embedded in the dried glue, leaving the image intact, but with a lovely, not-so-perfect end result. For their own personal projects using this technique, students can then embellish the image however they want using pastel, marker, crayon— anything really. (see Jana’s beach image overlaid with pastel above)
Peeling off the paper…
Getting creative…
What’s been interesting is that everyone wants a perfectly transferred photo and that never happens. It amazes me how quickly some students “give up” when they don’t like what they first see.
Jaden’s photo of a clay bowl he made didn’t turn out like he thought it would. Somehow most of the image peeled away and you couldn’t tell what it was anymore. He seemed thoroughly discouraged. But I said, hey wait a minute, forget this was ever supposed to be a bowl. Just use it as a starting place for an abstract piece— it doesn’t have to BE anything. Didn’t you guys just finish a unit on abstract expressionism? He added color, glued on some string he took from the frayed edges of his canvas, and voila! (He has titled it Not a Bowl, lol.)
Jaden’s abstract
Maya didn’t like that the image of her dog didn’t look “real,” so she just started coloring over the whole thing and painting a big purple border— she likes how it looks more like a cartoon now.
Maya’s dog
It’s so hard to let go of expectations! Good grief, I can certainly relate, but what I’d forgotten is how early in life this starts, the thinking that we’ve failed at something because we don’t like how it’s turned out after the first try. I think of my own work, how “stuck” I feel not knowing how I want to print photographs anymore. I don’t even give myself the chance to play around with ideas. Maybe I need to be a student in my own class :-P
** The question I am asked most about my work at OSSB is “How do blind kids make art?” and the first part of my answer is that the students there have a wide range of visual ability. Some have blurred vision while others can see shapes or colors or varying degrees of brightness. Fully blind students might need a little extra guidance or a different way of showing them how to do something, but everyone has a good time in art class (and, yes, they all have Instagram accounts).