Recent Projects

Books into Murals Project

The Mountain School & Glenwood Springs Elementary School

Meeting weekly, on Monday afternoons, a group of student in Kindergarten through 5th grade  practice reuse and recycling through the creation of a permanent collage wall mural. The paper materials used in the mural are discarded , damaged or unwanted books that have been pulled from school classrooms. The group discusses the necessity of and creative possibilities of recycling in everyday life during every class. Children have the experience of creating color palettes from pieces they cut from these trashed books. These pieces are then pasted into a large permanent wall mural through a process of "painting with paper and glue". The finished mural will be 10'x40' approximately depicting a mountain landscape with a bird and star filled sky.

This project is currently in progress , due to be complete in late Spring of 2025. 

Completed 2021.

 Early Childhood Education (ECE) Wing 

I was asked to design and create a permanent mural on a 9ft x 22ft interior wall in the main entrance. This is a high traffic area where parents drop off and pick up their pre-schoolers daily. The room also acts as a multipurpose room for group activities, performances, staff meetings and as the main location for the extended day program. I wanted the mural to be colorful, visually exciting and engaging while also being a learning tool in itself.

The mural was created entirely from pages of picture books which I collected from the recycle bins and trash cans in the pre-school classrooms and the from the elementary school library. The only books I used had been "pulled" due to physical damage (torn pages or water damage, etc.). The individual pages were cut into thousands of  2"x2" "mosaic" squares, which became my palette.

The mural incorporated hundreds of  "trashed" books. Printed words were included to allow the mural to serve as community inclusive/dual-language (English/Spanish). The mural functions as a teaching  tool assisting with learning objectives such as identification of colors, counting, vocabulary development and language comprehension.

Photo of project in progress 

Detail. 

Each riser has been collaged with 1"x1" "mosaic" pieces gathered from the owners' personal archives or collections. 

Above- Selected portraits/faces from collection of vintage photographs & newspaper/magazine clippings.

Detail.

Selected sections of New Yorker Magazine Covers from owners' collection.