Central High School students turn reeds, wire, paper into art

Giant bugs made from reeds, copper wires and tissue paper hang in the atrium in front of Central High School's office.

"I just like to show what the students are capable of doing," art teacher Robert Friedrich said.

Two sophomores and 18 junior and seniors in his advanced sculpture class spent 35 minutes a day for five weeks on the bugs.

They started by capturing and observing the bugs, sketching enlargements of the bugs and ended with creating a 3-D skeletal sculpture.

The project encouraged students to use their creative-thinking and problem-solving skills, Friedrich said.

"It's pretty challenging and I'm pretty impressed with the results that I've had," he said.

At first it was hard for the students to see how the project was going to turn out. Friedrich said he knew a lot of the students weren't going to like the project, but as they went along it became clearer and more students enjoyed it.

"The longer they worked on it, and the more they got done on it, the more they started to recognize what they were actually constructing, which is part of the purpose of sculpture," Friedrich said.

Senior Megan Staufenbiel, who created a giant fly, agreed with Friedrich.

"It wasn't as hard as I thought it was going to be once I started planning things out and figuring out how I was going to put pieces together it got so much easier."

The hardest part for Staufenbiel was working with the reeds.

"Just making the reed work with you and getting it to do what you wanted it to was so difficult because it doesn't like to bend. You can wet it and it flattens out, but it doesn't like to bend," Staufenbiel said.

Pencil drawings from Friedrich's Art I class are also displayed with the sculptures.

ameyer@semissourian.com

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