By Becky Love, Events Coordinator, Advancement
"The piano keys are black and white, but they sound like a million different colors in your mind."
….Maria Christine Mena
Sally Taylor '92Sally Taylor '92 visited campus to share her Consenses Project with current Tabor students. Sally, an accomplished singer, is working with hundreds of artists of all mediums to create an exhibit that is full of various interpretive "chains." An example: The first artist, a songwriter, interprets a painting in music, then a dancer interprets the song into dance, a sculptor then interprets the dance in form and so on, trying to utilize multiple senses. No one knows whose work they are interpreting, as no names are revealed. She is now working to create a travelling exhibit of all these various pieces of the chain.
Sally worked with Mr. Howland's creative writing class and Tricia Smith's art class. I was lucky enough to sit in! Sally began by showing the students one of the chains, which went from painting to poem to dance with music, to perfume, to photograph. She asked them, as they watched, to think of a title, an emotion and a theme that it represented to them. Then they shared…no wrong answers, just different thought processes and interpretations of what they saw and heard. She then played a piece of music and asked students to interpret through watercolor. After the exercise was complete and they shared their works, Sally showed them a part of the chain from her project; the painting that had inspired the piece of music, and the painting that was inspired by the piece of music. She took the student creations to include in her final installation.
I took much away from the experience, but perhaps the best overall message is that no one is wrong. We all see things differently, and can all learn from, and relate to, another's perception.
We don’t all see things in the same way, and that is the true beauty of this project.
