Some people like to take the easy way out in school, but that certainly isn’t my style. I’ve taken art since I started high school, and I had always just done what needed to be done and left it at that. In my senior art year however, was quite different. Our final project was, to be put simply, to be based on anything. We were given the freedom to chose an style of work, and topic, and any theme. The only restrictions we had were that it:
A) Had to have a theme or message to portray, and

B) It had to be done in about 3 weeks (about 8 hours).

So back to my main point. I didn’t just do what I had to do to get by. I could have painted a picture, or done a controversial installation. But no, no; that was too easy. I chose to build an 8 foot tall tree out of bus transfers (long, multi-coloured strips, in my city). Now, considering I am a modest 5’6″ tall, this was quite a task.

I started with a PVC pipe, some sort of toilet plumbing I found at Home Hardware, and a bunch of plaster. I somehow managed to get the pipe standing up-right with a plaster base. Then I took a ton (I mean a heck of a lot of) metal wire and started shaping my branches. Now, at this point, I had a sad looking skeleton of a tree and had used about 8 hours of my life already.

Next, I started the fun part. Shaping my mess into an actual tree with nothing other than newspaper and scotch tape. I don’t even know how long I spent taping newspaper to the tree. It didn’t stop there either; I still had to do a few layers of paper maché. After my three layers of paper maché, I finally (keep in mind that by this point I was pretty much living in the Art room) started to finish. After that, I glued down all my bus transfers in a sort of gradient style.

The entire point of this project, for me, was to take the paper wasted by my local transit, and reconstruct the tree that they were once part of. It was a very environmental piece, and was a jab at the tens of thousands of pieces of paper used unnecessarily each day. I tried to keep my materials in the realm of recycled things (old newspapers, pipes lying around my house, old coat hangers, etc) to again push that theme of environmental kindness. I’d say the message comes through quite well. It is an 8 foot tall tree covered in bus transfers after all (not to mention my teacher loved it!)

Slide me!