Family Art Project: Visual Poetry

Make it!

One art critic has said of multimedia artist Jim Hodges’ work that, “He can tease visual poetry from rather ordinary materials,” a sentiment that made his dreamy pieces perfect objects of our latest art imitation.

Hodges, who has a retrospective at the Dallas Museum of Art opening this fall, uses materials such as fabrics, plastic flowers, wire, and gold leaf to create delicate installations and gilded sculptures that often hang from the ceiling like precious curtains or are built to feel like small, decadent rooms.

For this project, we drew inspiration from Hodges’ With the Wind, a wall sculpture made of breezy, multicolored scarves that have been layered to create a patchwork of warm color. Using painted vellum as a translucent alternative to silk scarves, we opted to create a paper version of Hodges’ fabric piece. The addition of gold glitter paid homage to the artist’s other, more gilded pieces and indulged my 6-year-old daughter’s fondness for shiny bits (okay, and mine, too).

The result of the simple collage project was a fluttery, dynamic surface filled with a child’s execution of some Hodges-worthy visual poetry—so easy and so stunning.