Wire Athletes

  

Alexander Calder, Helen Wills, 1927. Wire and wood.

I plan to do another wire sculpture project soon and realised I've never posted about these, which were inspired by the amazing wire sculptures of American artist Alexander Calder
(1898 - 1976).

These wire sculptures were created by a group of grade 6 students a couple of years ago to celebrate the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008. We began this project by doing a lot of contour drawing using only one line to create drawings of Olympic athletes from photographs. We also looked at a lot of pictures of Alexander Calder's work. Each student then created a sculpture of a specific type of athlete using one long piece of wire (some used some smaller pieces of rainbow wire to add detail also). This was a difficult project but one of my favourites.