Students in Mrs. Christeleit’s Sculpture 2 classes at Penn-Trafford High School explore various media such as plaster and recycled objects during the semester-long course. They recently completed a plaster casting project of their hands, with the objective of communicating a memory from their past and their vision of the future in a multi-layered artwork.
Students submitted an Artist Statement to provide the viewer with additional information about their project and how they conveyed past and future through hand positioning, color, symbols, and mixed media.
Twelfth-grader Fiona Bondra provided the following statement to describe her project:
“For my past hand, I wanted to use darker colors that would represent things that have gone wrong in the past. The green fusing with the vines and moss shows that the past is trying to hold onto you and keep you stuck in that one moment, but the other hand which represents the future is trying to lift you up. The lighter colors on the other hand represent how free and happy you feel when you finally let go of what happened in the past and focus on the future. The skull shapes around the past hand represent loss and grief of those I’ve lost and the clear stones are supposed to be the tears shed. The future hand is elevated because it is rising above what has happened and it is trying to help the past out of that depressive state so the two can join. That is why there is purple on the fingers where the hands meet; to show the joining of the past and future.”
10th-graders Abigal Worley and Carmella Dubbs
Devan Hohman (11th-grade) and Keirsten Blasco (12th-grade)
10th-grader Aiden McCaw applies layers of plaster gauze in preparation for the plaster cast
Helping Hand by Fiona Bondra
Past and Future Hand Sculpture by Carmella Dubbs
From Past to Present by Olivia Clothier