Walls to the Ball

Walls to the Ball is a project pro­duced by artist Hazel Mey­er in col­lab­o­ra­tion with a grade 10 and a grade 11/12 art class from a large sec­ondary school in Toron­to. The project was exe­cut­ed over an 8 week peri­od of time. The stu­dents were intro­duced to a num­ber of con­tem­po­rary artists, exper­i­ment­ed with dif­fer­ent knot­ting tech­niques includ­ing macramé and braid­ing, and col­lab­o­rat­ed on pro­duc­ing two large bas­ket­ball-type nets, each one stretch­ing 40 feet in length.

After weeks of braid­ing ‘labor’ in the art class­room the stu­dents installed the project in the gym, tying the two net­ted con­struc­tions togeth­er. Stu­dents not in the art pro­gram were invit­ed dur­ing lunch hour to inter­act and engage with the net – which includ­ed jump­ing over the net, swing­ing it, and shoot­ing any num­ber of the 15 bas­ket­balls that were in play. One stu­dent was enlist­ed to use a drum to cre­ate a rhyth­mic beat in the gym space and oth­ers joined him, tak­ing turns on the drum kit.The res­i­den­cy empha­sized the use of mate­ri­als out­side of their giv­en form or mean­ing, the acti­va­tion of bod­ies and space, and chal­lenged stu­dents to think about dif­fer­ent ways to work togeth­er to devel­op a con­tem­po­rary work of art.