Dec 27, 2017 3 min read

WAYNESBURG – Waynesburg’s Intermediate Unit 1 campus is making art with their trash.

The school is finishing up a 10-week residency with an artist from the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. The art installation uses repurposed materials collected through the school’s recycling program to create a sensory mural. Artist Lindsay Woge said it’s been an ongoing project, working with the students participating several times a week.

Sarah D’Urzo is a manager for the Center for Professional Development for Intermediate Unit 1 and helped with the collaboration.

“Art can be more than going out and having to buy things,” D’Urzo said. “This gives the students a way to express themselves.”

This most recent project takes a look at how to make art and projects sustainably. The school is developing a fab lab with 3D printers and other gadgets, but those produce lots of waste. They wanted to look at a way to teach students to repurpose materials and make art with sustainable sources. The goal is to teach students they don’t necessarily need new materials to make art.

Students helped build a permanent installation and a temporary “cardboard quilt.”

Each student had the chance to create their own piece of art for the quilt using paint, paper mache and other reused materials, like old keyboard keys and magazine clippings. Woge said the finished projects would be zip-tied together and hung up to make a grid of recycled materials. But after the temporary display is taken down, students are able to take home their piece.

Woge said there’s a lot of innovating with the project. If something doesn’t work the way a student intended, they try another idea.

The sensory wall is a more permanent element to the display. Students worked to make art with sustainable sources. It has water bottles, pieces of fabric and other reused materials that students can touch and play with. It’s interactive, and not a flat piece of art.

“It’s really just the creative thinking skills and the higher-level learning we’re employing here,” Woge said. “We’re giving new life to trash.”

It gives the students a chance to interact with a practicing artist as well as bringing in the sustainable element. Most of the students that are able to take part have a piece of art they can continue to enjoy long after the residency has concluded. IU1 has done several artists in residence projects over the past three or four years.

Derek Postlewaite was watching some of his second- through sixth-grade students as they participated in the project Dec. 14.

“A lot of the kids in this school need hands-on stuff,” he said.

The art project allows them to get out of their normal classroom, giving them a creative outlet. It also teaches them to follow steps and directions, he said.

On Dec. 14, Woge taught about six high school students about the papier-mache they were using, which was pulverized pre-consumer waste paper. It behaved like clay, drying lightweight onto their cardboard rectangles. Some students painted on their creations or made glyphs and runes from some of their favorite video games, while others didn’t like the feel and opted to help string together the completed quilt.

Down the hall, the school’s maintenance workers screwed in the pieces for the permanent display ahead of an exhibition to showcase the installation before the holiday break.