Reaching Up
Collage on board
Two enormous gray hands loom over a small green chalkboard, pressing down from above. Beneath them, a child’s arm stretches up, fingers open, hand raised in a classroom. Only a sliver of the child shows at the bottom edge, a few strands of dark hair and one thin arm, but the gesture is clear: the child still wants to answer, to be heard, to learn.
The hands are cut from books, with every crease, wrinkle, and knuckle crisp. They overlap and crowd the scene, pushing into the frame and breaking past it. Around the chalkboard, a border of road maps in faded reds, yellows, and greens shows the towns and highways the children come from. Every one of those places has a school, and every school is being squeezed.
This piece comes from the frustration with how we treat our schools and our kids. We cut music and art and with them the room for children to think for themselves and be creative. We take away free breakfasts and lunches. We underpay the teachers we trust to raise our children. We send kids into buildings that aren’t safe because we love our guns more than we love them. The hands are all of those decisions, made by adults, falling on the smallest people in the room.
This isn’t one classroom or one town. It is a wide, map-sized view of a problem that reaches everywhere, and the raised hand is the one thing still pointing up.
Details:
Method: Collage
Quality: Smooth
Mood: Worldly
Reaching Up
Collage on board
Two enormous gray hands loom over a small green chalkboard, pressing down from above. Beneath them, a child’s arm stretches up, fingers open, hand raised in a classroom. Only a sliver of the child shows at the bottom edge, a few strands of dark hair and one thin arm, but the gesture is clear: the child still wants to answer, to be heard, to learn.
The hands are cut from books, with every crease, wrinkle, and knuckle crisp. They overlap and crowd the scene, pushing into the frame and breaking past it. Around the chalkboard, a border of road maps in faded reds, yellows, and greens shows the towns and highways the children come from. Every one of those places has a school, and every school is being squeezed.
This piece comes from the frustration with how we treat our schools and our kids. We cut music and art and with them the room for children to think for themselves and be creative. We take away free breakfasts and lunches. We underpay the teachers we trust to raise our children. We send kids into buildings that aren’t safe because we love our guns more than we love them. The hands are all of those decisions, made by adults, falling on the smallest people in the room.
This isn’t one classroom or one town. It is a wide, map-sized view of a problem that reaches everywhere, and the raised hand is the one thing still pointing up.
Details:
Method: Collage
Quality: Smooth
Mood: Worldly
