Still a Mystery

Remember the "Mystery Box" I received around the new year?  Where you are challenged to use the materials within to create a (this years theme) "reinterpretation of a work of art"?

My partner in crime Carmen Beecher and I have been hard at work imagining how this would go and experimenting with prototypes for our final work.  Yesterday we really dug in and made some progress which I will share with you here.

The cut up box has been gessoed, painted, painted and painted.....

Carmen has previously experimented with using a balloon as an armature for papermache (the balloon must be removed) so she starts in here confidently using the shredded packing materials for the paper and the elmers glue for the fixative.  Can you guess what this will be eventually?

 

Here's my little clay version of a boat with one of Carmen's figures in it...first several attempts to build a boat were busts: some wood way too hard to carve, the other wood just snapped and even after soaking would not bend...lots of failed attempts and we aren't yet settled on this one....

And now, a preliminary fitting.....what a long way we have to go!  Can you guess yet what work of art we are going to recreate?  Let me know....

Meanwhile, the fun of this challenge (besides the fantasy of winning $5000) is that we are forced to work with only the materials we are given....no running out to the hardware or the Dollar Tree to pick something up.  We can add liquids but that is all.

 I am reminded that this was exactly how the Apollo 10 (or 11?) astronauts were saved: the engineers on earth sat in a room with only what was available to the astronauts in space and they had to come up with a solution in a limited amount of time using only what was at hand.  Amazing!  And if more of us could think this way I bet our landfills would be half as full as they are now....just sayin'

Have a lovely Easter weekend, I hope spring finds you sometime soon.

Cindy