Katherine Soucie inspired textile sculptures

This summer I had the pleasure of running summer art camps for Seymour Art Gallery. All the art projects were inspired by the exhibition on display called Regeneratus containing the textile artworks of Katherine Soucie and Michelle Sirois-Silver.

(photo Katherine Soucie)

The sculpture project was inspired by artist Katherine Soucie and the young artist worked on it throughout the week.

(photo Katherine Soucie)

Both artist were looking at how to use waste materials in an innovative way. The works all incorporated discarded materials from the manufacturing process of Soucie's clothing line and her marvelous wrapped sewing machines, Raisons D'etres, were created using waste hosiery the artist hand dyed.

photo Katherine Soucie

The children and I spent some time looking at the wrapped machines and the kids had some very interesting ideas and observations regarding why the artist created the sculptures and what happened once the discarded machines were covered in the materials and became a sculptural shape.

Using the same philosophy the artist used to create the exhibition, the campers set out on a challenge to create a sculpture out of materials defined as garbage. Starting with plastic shopping bags, each young artist created a shape for their sculptural animal. 

They were then lucky enough to be able to wrap their plastic bag creation using hosiery waste Soucie had provided the campers. Each camper started wrapping with the waste hosiery in it's original state (white).

Once they had covered the plastic bag shapes and had spent some time refining their shapes with the white hosiery, the artists began to add some of the hand dyed waste hosiery the Soucie had so generously supplied.

There was no doubt that all the children felt it was very special to be able to use the same material both artists used in the exhibition to create their artwork and were so very excited that Soucie had shared her hand dyed hosiery waste with them. It was lovely to see how this small kind act really validated the importance of each child's creative exploration.

Usually I have tested projects prior to sharing with students but in this case due to the limited amount of supply, I had to rely on my concept based on a similar project I had done in the past. I did feel that it would of been far too complicated for children to create facial features for their animals out of the fabric wrapping and so I introduced paper-mache clay.

This dried very light so I knew it would not make the sculptures top heavy. I also figured it would be easy to get a needle and thread through so that they could be sewn onto the sculpture bases like mask.

Once the clay was dry, children used watercolors and black permanent markers to add detail.

It was so interesting to see the variety of ways each child used to resolve the prompt given at the beginning of the week. For me it was rewarding to see children get lost in a task that was very time consuming, challenging at times even as the navigate through a world now based on instant gratification.

Each and every child was so proud of their final creations when finished and the project was appropriate for all ages- from 6 to high school. The finished works looked amazing when on display during the art show the gallery puts on during the last day of camp for the families.

I was quite proud of each and every child's final artwork inspired by the beautiful work of the artist in this exhibition.