Art School | Wire Sculpture
by Deborah Harju, posted on December 10th, 2012 in Art School
We’ve explored numerous artists and methods in the past few months, but we haven’t experimented with sculpting yet. I think today is the day! Sculptures are visual art, three dimensional, and can include carving and modeling of almost all materials from wood to ceramics to metal. Today we will explore wire sculpting. This was something new to me and I learned just as much as the kids.
Elizabeth Berrien is a world famous wire sculptor, who is most known for her animal pieces. Her technique is using only her bare hands and wire cutters. Check out the images above and below. Just phenomenal what can be created with hands and a single tool.
Using the same technique, we decided it would be fun try our hand at wire sculpting. With 24 gauge wire and a few pairs of cutters we were ready to start.
Supplies: wire cutters, 24 gauge wire
supplies for this lesson were provided by Kollabora
It can be a little intimidating for kids to just sit down and try to create something from nothing, so I decided to take a seat next to my 8-year-old and create right alongside him. Once he saw me clip my first wire and start to bend it, he went for it. Excuse the photos in this post, wire is a pretty tough thing to photograph I learned!
He decided pretty quickly he wanted to make a snake, and I stuck with a girl figure. His snake was coming along very nicely.
But he thought something was missing. After searching through our supplies, he discovered fuse beads would do the trick to make some eyes. And I added a necklace to my girl.
We decided it would also be fun to create a back story for our sculptures and pretty soon his snake was stalking my girl. Happy sculpting!
