Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Nescio

One art assignment for the ninth grade was to write a short explanation of the paper sculpture he or she created.  I found this one exceptionally well written, and downright funny with all of its dramatic, high school  vocabulary.  Before reading it, imagine trying to get about 100 tightly rolled pieces of paper to stick to a 12x18 sheet of construction paper. 

NESCIO

 This sculpture is a collection of tightly rolled strips of magazine pages arranged in a radial pattern to form a circle.  My original intent was to arrange the rolls at different lengths so that, instead of a circle, they formed a heart.

But the laws of physics, the bane of artistic freedom, intervened, leaving my envisioned artwork in tatters.  Even the title I had devised, because it had pertained to the heart, was ruined. 

So I was stuck with the exasperating task of finding a new title.  After a few days of fruitless thinking, inspiration struck. “Nescio,” a Latin word, translates to “I don’t know,” which seemed sufficient to describe my predicament.

This sculpture stands as proof that Latin class may actually be helpful in life.  

2 comments:

Susan Kane said...

I wish I had known that word for a college art class. I used Kanji for "nothing" with an insipid string art, which was meant to say that this craft was meaningless. the professor did not understand it, since he never showed up for the class and viewed the art without the students present.

Beth Zimmerman said...

Cute! =)