Project Description

Goals

Engage in meditation focused on our relationship with the environment

Reflect on our identities in relation to nature

Write poetry about nature and the future

Create an art book collage incorporating this poetry and recycled paper materials found around the home.

In a three part series, students will create an art book with collage and creative writing that represents reflections about identity and environment.  Students are first engaged in a conversation about our relationship to nature and then guided through meditation before constructing a speculative future through images from magazines and other print material found in their home.   In the second part of the series, students will play with words through several collaborative and independent exercises that generate short poems about nature and open space for dialogue about the future. Then they will cut and fold their collage into a book, splicing and flipping the image to gain new perspective on the shapes and colors they originally placed. In the third part, students will finish their books by exploring graphic images and text styles with which to add one or more of the poems they generated. They will finalize their art book as an artifact of their link to the natural world, and consider audiences to share their work with.

This is appropriate for learners grades 6-12.

Find the lesson outline here

Parts two and three of the video series can be found below.

Photos of completed art book collages may be submitted here.

About Creator

Lindsey Peck Scherloum
Lindsey Peck Scherloum
Lindsey Peck Scherloum is a North Braddock, PA based artist who works in sculpture, installation, media arts and performance to create collaborative and participatory experiences that prompt stories and human connection around ordinary objects and our place in the natural world. She has done this as a teaching artist at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, The Mattress Factory, Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History, the Braddock Youth Project and with people incarcerated at Allegheny County Jail and PA State Correctional Institute. She was recently resident artist at United Somali Bantu of Greater Pittsburgh, through Pittsburgh’s Office of Public Art artist in the public realm residencies, where she worked collaboratively with refugees to solve community problems through creative processes. She is currently researching strategies to collectively examine, introspect, and share stories around hard topics through the use of handwork and collaborative creation.

She holds an interdisciplinary BA in art and anthropology from New York University, and an MFA in creative writing from Chatham University. Her work has been shown in spaces across the US including Carnegie Museum of Art and the National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium, and has been published in journals such as Hot Metal Bridge and Fiber Art Now.