Paper Sculpture

The objective of this project was to create a sculpture that reflected in one word how we felt about our first semester/first half of the school year. However, the catch was that we had to use only one large sheet of paper along with some tape and glue to construct our sculpture. The word I chose was “patchy” or more better fit, “uneven”. My first half of the school year had rough patches and good patches, so it was kind of common grounds where it wasn’t all bad, but it also wasn’t all easy and happy. My sculpture came out in the form of a paper doll, one that was a little crinkled and patched-up but still smiling in the end.

To do this, I first rolled up a cylinder with a strip of the paper that I had cut. Then, I took another larger piece of paper and ripped it up into little, patchy pieces, and then glued it all over the body of the cylinder. After that I decided to make some arms and legs, and to keep up with the wrinkled and patched look, I wrinkled up the strips I cut up for arms and legs and then unfolded them. After that I hot-glued the legs to the bottom of the body and the arms to the sides. This gave the doll a more worn-out look. After that I cut out some eyes and a smiling mouth for the face and glued those on. I also added a heart to make it look a little less unhappy and grim.

My sculpture didn’t really come out to represent the word exactly how I planned it would, but I like how it came out. When we did the peer critique in class, a lot of people guessed that my word was happy, content, or fake. However, I like the words they came up with better than my original words. Not only did they represent my sculpture better, but also coincidentally, my feelings about the first semester. I think using “content” or “okay” would have been a better fit for my sculpture and semester than the one I used. If I could I would change the word to “okay”, even though it’s kind of a broad and easy word. I think it represents better how the semester was patchy, but I came out “okay” in the end.