Stone Soup

One of my favorite stone soup type projects was a group exercise in a drawing class that I took several years ago. Unlike the project we did on Tuesday where all of the participants bring a different material or ingredient to be incorporated into a piecemeal whole, everybody in this class was asked to bring the same thing: a drawing implement.

When class began that day, there was a large piece of paper on every desk, folded into sixths. Each student was instructed to draw for 10 minutes, and then stop when time was called. There was no real restriction to what we could draw, other than to be simple enough to look complete after a short amount of time. After 10 minutes, we were told to refold the paper so that a new blank sixth of the paper was exposed. To successfully continue with the project, we had to be sure that the new, blank part of the paper was on the same side of the sheet that we had been drawing on initially.

After everybody had completed their folding, we each passed our paper to the person on our left. As each of us received our new piece of paper, we were instructed not to look at what the person before us had drawn. At this point, drawing resumed again for another 10 minutes, at which point we refolded and passed clockwise as before. These actions were then repeated four more times, until all six panels of each folded sheet were filled. We then unfolded the paper in front of us; that we had each most recently sketched on.

Not knowing what others before us had drawn, we each held a blind collaborative drawing that was unique and random, as each person had input with his or her own individual style. As a class, we then hung all of the finished pieces on the wall, three pages high by five wide. We discussed and decided as a group which piece should go where, and which ones looked best next to each other. Our final product was a very cool abstract group drawing, comprising of both abstract and iconic panels making up a very large checkerboard style grid, and we left it up for the remainder of the class sessions.