Students team up on sculpture to celebrate school's 10th anniversary

Conley Elementary school will be marking its 10th anniversary next year and a monumental celebration is planned. All 850 students, kindergarten-fifth grade, have participated in the creation of a special sculpture. The piece depicts a…

Conley Elementary school will be marking its 10th anniversary next year and a monumental celebration is planned. All 850 students, kindergarten-fifth grade, have participated in the creation of a special sculpture. The piece depicts a little girl which will be installed next to the existing sculpture of a little boy who will now have a reading companion.

Both sculpture projects were initiated by Dr. Marcia Meale who has taught art at Conley from day one. The original sculpture has been in place for eight years and was created by three generations of the Cooley family, celebrated local artists. Meale wanted to expand on their work and emphasize the inclusive and collaborative philosophy of the school.

“The idea is to work with a sculptor and have the kids do some of the work,” said Meale who received an Arts Education Grant from the Council on Culture & Arts for the project. With the grant funds supplied by Kia of Tallahassee, she was able to supplement other fundraising efforts and buy clay and pay local sculptor Matthew Filiault to get the process started.

Filiault built an armature to provide internal structural support for the sculpture and the students had the opportunity to add clay to the basic form. “Then the sculptor worked on it and it came back to me. I checked it over and did the finishing work with the help of another local artist. Then I drove it to the foundry, south of Atlanta,” Meale explained.

The piece was then cast in bronze but first it went through an elaborate mold making process which Conley art students also learned about. “It goes from clay to a mold, to wax, to another mold, to metal,” Meale said. “I’m trying to get the idea across that we see the positive, negative, positive, negative, positive,” a complex and relatively abstract idea for elementary aged students.

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