Woven art project designed to inspire students
BLUE BELL >> For the past three hours, Patrick Rodgers has been standing about 30 feet off the ground inside a bucket lift slowly stringing strands of translucent orange monofilament fishing line diagonally down to his colleague, Steve Wanna, standing on a ladder about 70 feet away.
The two men, along with their colleague Dianne Zotter-Mill, assistant professor of art, have slowly been weaving a spiral harp-shaped web across the foyer inside College Hall on Montgomery County Community College’s Central Campus as part of a new contextual art piece designed to make students think about the world around them.
“It’s been fun seeing it come together,” said Rodgers, now safely back on the ground. He works as director of the college’s two art galleries on its Central and Pottstown campuses. “It’s been fun trying to weave it together.”
When completed, the trio will have strung 42,000 feet of the string weighing 10 pounds into 600 strands. The material was chosen for its weight and the way it shines differently when light hits it throughout the day. The new sculpture is the brain child of Wanna, assistant professor of music and sound recording technology, and ZotterMill, who wanted to create a piece designed to inspire students and get them to think about the concept of space.
“The ultimate goal is for everybody to stop and everybody’s going to see it in a different way,” said ZotterMill. “Everybody’s going to visualize it in a different way. Just respond to it as art. Go ‘wow, what is this? That’s really cool. Look it’s turning upon itself.’ It’s just going to continue to morph and build as we turn.”
Depending on the time of day and the environment outside the foyer, composed of large windows, will affect the way you can see the strands. At times they’ll be very easy to see. Other times not so much, based on where the light touches them.
“We wanted it to disappear in some places and actually be seen in other places,” Zotter-Mill explained. “So you can get that morphing of the whole entire sculpture. That’s what this is; we’re sculpting the space.”
“It’s conceptual art,” said Wanna. “It’s art that’s inherently part of the space. The space is part of it. This wouldn’t exist anywhere else.”
Zotter-Mill and Wanna said they were curious whether the strings would begin to vibrate and make a sound similar to a Aeolian harp once students created wind from entering and exiting the building, but admitted they had no idea.
While the piece is certainly designed to be visually interesting, Zotter-Mill said it works on a deeper level too. She wants it to help students develop critical thinking skills and apply them to the world around them after looking at it.
“They need to appreciate their space,” she said. “Be it inside, outside, wherever they happen to be. Look around you, be aware of your surroundings. What can I do in that space? What could be done in that space? Those are kinds of critical thinking we’re trying to get them to start to acknowledge.”
“This could be a pretty dull space if you just pass through it in and out, or you’re sitting doing work and you’re bored or sad,” Wanna said. “But this interrupts your relationship with the space.”
Their collaboration is an example of what can be done by working as a team, another important lesson, she said. First they came up with a design and built a scale model using a 3D printer and some wood. Then they got approval from the administration. From there it was gather-
ing the necessary materials and team members needed to begin to build. Then beginning at 8 a.m. Sunday they started the arduous process, unsure of when the piece would be finished. By 11 a.m. they were about a third of the way finished.
At a time when it can feel like life moves at an instantaneous pace for students, especially online, demonstrating the reward of patience is a lesson they would do well to learn, Zotter-Mill said.
“When you have an idea, you have to take that idea and really build upon it,” she said. “You have to think it all through. Then it’s going to take step by step, by step, by step over time to be able create that.”
The new piece is expected to stay in its current form for at least a few weeks, then Zotter-Mill said they’ll probably take it down and put up something new and different somewhere else.
“We might take it down and then we might morph it into something else, someplace else on campus,” she said. “It might just appear in a different place. That’s what we’re thinking. It might be different color, a different medium. It’ll be a different building. It might be vertical instead of horizontal. It might be three dimensional spiraling down. We have no idea. It might be outside and just appear. That was kind of our idea as well.”
For now, they said they’d wait to hear the reaction come Monday.
“Hopefully it will make them think,” Wanna said.