We recently remodeled our lobby (among other spaces) in one of our buildings but there's still one unfinished wall by the front door. It's waiting for us to complete our corporate art project.
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| "I feel so nekkid!" |
It's quite the job, too. One of our VPs used to be an art teacher and she's really into pottery and ceramics with a kiln at her house. Our CEO is a cactus freak. Really. He even discovered a previously uncatalogued cactus one time and got to name it.
So, the project combines both of their interests. We're making ceramic tiles to put on the wall and we're using cacti shapes for the molds.
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| Taking over a conference room for art class. |
Everyone in the company has been invited to attend one of the tile making sessions. We need over 400 tiles in all so it's a lot of work.
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| Cutting the tiles from the big blocks of clay. |
A few experts cut the tiles into the right size height, width and depth. Then, the rest of us got to go to work.
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| Made with one of the deeper molds. |
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| Working with the molds. |
We used molds made from actual cacti. In fact, a few of the molds still had cactus needles in them so we had to be careful. For the deep molds, we pushed the clay in then molded additional clay in to fill in the resulting depression.
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| Pressing in an actual plant. |
We also had some nature shapes to push in or roll on to the clay. You could make lots of variations but you couldn't put your initials on anything or use anything other than the tools given. Quality control, I guess. I think a tiny "Princess" wouldn't have hurt anything. ;)
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| Close up of a completed tile. |
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| More completed tiles. |
The day I worked on them was one those "could it be any MORE stressful?" days. I decided the world would not end if I took twenty minutes to get my hands dirty and hang out with some of my colleagues. In that time, I made three tiles, did get my hands pretty dirty and dropped my stress level back to normal. I also got to say hey to some folks I don't see very often.
I wish we had arts and crafts every day!
I don't envy our Facilities Staff who has to make sure they all stay on the wall. They're fairly heavy.
It's going to look quite (hopefully not literally) smashing when it's done, though!
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