Puzzle Piece Mural

Transitioning from eighth grade to high school is an important time in a student’s life. At our school, the end of year typically includes a commencement ceremony, a big party with a dance, and a huge dodgeball tournament. Then the pandemic changed everything.

A poem written by a 2020 eighth-grader inspired this project. During our remote learning from April to May 2020, our librarian held a poetry contest. One poem, “Dear Friends,” truly captured that moment in time. It considers what the writer thinks she would have done differently if she had known the day we left school that we wouldn't return to in-person learning for three long months.

Designing a Symbolic Mural
After receiving permission from the poet and a grant from our local Public School Foundation, I began to design a 4 x 6' (1 x 2 m) ceramic mural that would feature the poem and allow my students to make artistic choices. To prepare, I pushed four large desks together, covered them in plastic, and cut clay slabs using a multi-slab cutter.
We used puzzle piece–shaped

We used puzzle piece–shaped cookie cutters and multiple sizes of circle cutters to incise the clay. Using a roller, a student pressed paper masks into the clay in several places. A texture rubbing plate with concentric circles was also used as a stamp to portray ripples in water, to represent the choices we make spreading out from us and touching others.

Students lightly pressed in additional cookie cutters shaped like puzzle pieces to symbolize that lots of people enjoyed jigsaw puzzles and games during isolation, but also to represent how our society is made up of individual people who all belong.

I carved an Among Us video game character from an eraser to create a stamp and we hid a few around the mural because many of our students and their families also enjoyed playing that game together at home.

Underglazing
Next, we applied underglaze and underglaze transfers. The underglaze bubble technique represents the social bubbles we live in. Students added transfer dots to refer to how desks are distanced and graphic lines to impose some order on our painterly surface, which includes brushstrokes and splatters. A large orange spring design was added to represent that we can be crushed but we bounce back.

Adding Inscriptions
Each night, I covered the clay with several layers of plastic tablecloths and boards to keep it moist enough to work. The next step was to cover the entire surface in a layer of wax so students could scratch in words and sayings such as, “We are all in the same storm but not the same boat,” and a dedication message from the current eighth-grade class to next year’s students.

Students also inscribed long connecting lines all over the mural to indicate how we are all connected. Underglaze was wiped into these areas to highlight the marks.

Firing and Assembling
Because we were using underglaze and wax, the first firing was stacked with no problem. Then, as each shelf load was removed from the kiln, students had the fun of putting the pieces back together.

Once the whole mural was fired and reconstructed, students added a clear glaze and repeated the process. It took multiple firings since the pieces couldn’t be stacked after they were painted with glaze. Many students participated in putting the final pieces back together. The finishing touch was adding a few details of donated gold luster. To honor those lost to COVID-19, we left one piece undecorated except for a gold heart.

Installation
Our maintenance team constructed a sturdy framed panel for the mural. The whole eighth-grade class signed the back, and students carefully moved the pieces to the panel, gluing them in place. A few larger pieces had to be broken to lay flat, but by then we had already realized how the flaws and irregularities only added to the texture and meaning of the piece.

It was finally time to place the most important piece, our poem. I had a silkscreen of the poem made via Etsy and printed it in dark-blue underglaze on a leather-hard slab before firing. After everything was firmly glued in place, we added grout with icing bags. After the grout dried, we used blue and orange grout stain to unify the composition and adjust visual weight.

The mural is hung in a prominent place beside two large west facing windows that highlight the texture and sparkle, where students can see it as they arrive and leave each day. The mural stands as a physical record of things we felt, experienced, and learned through this strange time in history, and shows that we got through it together.