Tension mounts as students from Germany delve into new art form
By Eric B. Pilgrim,
Stars and Stripes
Photo courtesy of Sandra Kennedy
Bianca Rodriguez-Keyes, who was a freshman this year at Heidelberg High School, paints a
panel on one of several tensegrities that now hang at Galerie Graf in old town Heidelberg,
Germany. |
HEIDELBERG, Germany — They hang around in a little, narrow art
gallery, bathing flat, yellowed walls with a rainbow of color and lines.
But few know they’re here in this old part of town.
Cars and trucks stop outside the big display window, waiting for a
green light. Occasionally, somebody looks in and stares. There, in the window of Galerie
Graf, hang several unusual works of architectural art created by 30 high school students
from Heidelberg.
Tensegrity, deriving its name from the collision of tension and
integrity, is both visually and intellectually stimulating. And its appeal has caught hold
of not only students at Heidelberg High School, but also others in the local American and
German communities.
Local jazz artist and Youth Services worker Pax Wallace introduced
the school to tensegrity in December.
Sandra Kennedy, the high school art teacher, said Wallace originally
came in and pitched the idea to her as a way to strengthen ties between Youth Services and
the school. He adopted an area in the back of the room. She gave him wooden dowels and
dental floss, and he started building a tensegrity piece while the students painted.
Eric B. Pilgrim / Stars and Stripes
Sandra Kennedy, right, the art teacher at Heidelberg High School in Geramany, and Galerie
Graf manager Christina Schäfer talk amid the student-constructed tensegrities displayed
at the gallery. |
“Attention quickly shifted to what Pax was doing,” Kennedy
said. “It spread from there.”
Before long, the back of the room became the focus of lessons, as
Wallace explained the mathematical concepts behind the unusual art form.
Kennedy shifted her lessons to incorporate tensegrities. Students
were not only studying art, they were also studying math and — possibly even stranger
— they were enjoying it.
The concept of tensegrity is bound up in a geometric structure whose
design provides high flexibility to a rigid structure by linking it in a “continuous
tensional network,” much like an expansion bridge or a bicycle tire. But with
tensegrity, none of the rigid parts, or struts, touch. Instead, the whole structure is
kept together by tension from cables, string or, in Wallace’s case, dental floss.
The students took to it.
“I think we were really able to reach these kids,” Wallace
said. “And Sandra was really open to this, so everything just fell into place, pretty
much like silk.”
Three- and six-strut tensegrities soon took shape all around the
classroom under Wallace’s direction. In their purest form, tensegrities are just
beams and wires, a kind of skeletal body. Before long, a fresh idea emerged: why not cover
them with a skin?
Kennedy used this idea to incorporate another lesson plan. The
students are required to study one famous painter and write about what they learned.
Eric B. Pilgrim / Stars and Stripes
One of the more complex tensegrities made by Pax Wallace, a teacher at Heidelberg Youth
Services. |
During the spring term, she had students take that a step further;
they would paint panels in the style of their artist and mount the panels onto a
tensegrity.
The result is hanging in Galerie Graf until the end of June. But the
end is nowhere in sight for the students and community.
One piece was purchased at the gallery. The students and faculty at
Heidelberg are eyeing a small enclosed courtyard for an outside, very large tensegrity.
A German school will join the American students in their efforts next
school year. And there are limitless ways to make tensegrities, according to Wallace and
Kennedy.
“It could just go on and on and on,” Kennedy said.
“And it should. Art threads through our lives. It is the heart of our society.”
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