Students in the School of Art’s Advanced Metal Fabrication class created sculptures throughout the semester that were displayed on Pedestrian Walkway. • All photos courtesy of Zachary Edwards
Mystery of campus sculptures solved Mary Beth McCauley Staff Writer
Over the past few weeks, students may have noticed new art installations popping up around the Humanities building and the Art & Architecture building. The first of these sculptures remained in place for a week before disappearing and being replaced with new, completely different pieces the following week. The lack of a plaque or explanation for the structures left some asking if the university was responsible or if someone else placed these statues around
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campus. As it turns out, students in the School of Art’s Advanced Metal Fabrication class, also known as Sculpture 245, have been working on these sculptures throughout the semester. Erin Tucker, a teaching assistant for Sculpture 245, said the sculptures are students’ individual responses to a prompt that they were asked to base their art off of. “Once the assignments are complete, they are installed outside for about a week so they can be critiqued,” Tucker said. Jason Brown, the professor for Sculpture 245, enjoys the critiquing process and watching his students grow throughout the semes-
ter. “Critique day is always full of surprises, mostly positive,” Brown said. “It is rewarding to see the results of each student’s hard work, creative problem solving and growth in technical and conceptual skills. I think that a critique can be both a humbling and celebratory experience.” With the sculptures on display changing almost weekly, Tucker said the project requires students to work extremely hard and extremely fast. “For one prompt, students were required to build something that was as least 10 feet high. They’re doing a lot of work in this course,”
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Tucker said. For their final project, students will be focusing on the digital aspects of sculpture building. “The final project for the metal fabrication class is a digital fabrication assignment, in which each student is using the CNC plasma cutting tool in our metal shop,” Brown said. “This experience is helping them prepare for industrial and commercial opportunities but also to think differently about designing and fabricating objects.” See SCULPTURES on Page 8
Tuesday, November 22, 2016