I made these faces for a game with buttons. You grab a handful, put them on as eyes and figure out how far off you are from the perfect number. It was fine; they enjoyed it, but not nearly as much as the next thing we used the faces for. It was one of those spur-of-the-moment projects. After all, we had these faces…
Yes, that’s Bert with Ernie’s ear next to him, plus miscellaneous, multicultural faces.
So we began by turning them over so that there were no features on the faces. We set them all around a table and put this book in the middle. It’s Faces by Francois Robert.
Then we added a box full of all kinds of hardware and invited the kids to make faces. We save hardware all the time, pieces from machines we deconstruct, extra screws from shelves we didn’t put up, unidentified pieces that just appear on our counter. A lot of it goes into making art, but some goes in a box for ephemeral projects like this: art that only exists for a little bit, except for the photographs…like these:
Now this last one may look a little odd , a bit immature, but the child in question showed me the mouth (the red line), the nose (the former ear), the one eye (it’s a profile!) and all the hair. Then he admitted that he just hadn’t been able to stop. What’s not to like about a child that just can’t stop making art?
