Toucans, foxes, turtles and giraffes can now be found outside Great Falls High.
No, there isn’t a new zoo at the school. Students in art workshop classes and advanced painting and drawing designed ceramic animals or characters with the help of Great Falls Public Schools artist-in-residence Liisa Nelson. The ceramic figurines were then stacked together to form totem poles in the school’s sculpture garden on the southeast side of the main campus.
“I really like being able to do something for people to see and show my friends,” said sophomore Sonora Winters, who designed a toucan.
Nelson said totem poles are important to Native American tribes in the northwest and are often used to describe something about the family or clan. She asked students to consider making a character that was representative of them or significant to them.
Junior Skyler Spalding actually researched what animal was representative of her personality.
“I got an ox, which is really weird,” she said. “I didn’t want to do an ox.”
Instead, she made a duck, which was stacked, then glued with other characters and carefully slid onto re-bar that was cemented into the ground.
“I think it turned out really cool,” Spalding said of the project. “A lot of them are really unique.”
Tess Jacobs, art teacher at Great Falls High, said the teachers always try to find a group project to be placed in the sculpture garden, which was created three years ago thanks to a donation from the GFH class of 1970. In addition to the landscaping, art students have added a bronze sculpture and a welded bench to the area over the last couple of years.
“Our intention is to add to this every year,” she said.
A long-necked giraffe tops one of the poles, a rabbit wearing a top hat on another and a bird. One pole has a turtle at the base and another a strawberry in the middle.
“The stuff that they come up with is so creative,” said Nelson, who is a native of Great Falls. “This is stuff adults couldn’t come up with.”
The toucan doesn’t really speak to Winters’ soul. She began researching totem poles on the internet and kept finding images of toucans.
“This is the one animal that kept popping up,” Winters said. “I like the idea of a lot of different colors.”
Comments are closed.