Hungry for Stone Soup!

Stone Soup is generally a story about the coming together of a village, each bringing one ingredient from their homes, and combining them in a big pot, making a delicious soup for everyone to enjoy. Of course this is just the gist of the story, but if you'd like to read the actual story, you can find a similar (though not the original) version of the story here. In class the other day, we were assigned to bring our own arts and crafty ingredients to contribute to our own group's stoned soup. What I got from this exercise is that collaborations will always a guarantee in design, whether its between a large group of 7 or more, or as subtle as just one artist influenced by another.

Collaborating can be either a good or bad thing for artists. When working with others, one can learn or share new techniques, ideas, information, and even overcome any issues quicker with the power of two or more minds collaborating together. Others can see problems or solutions that one might have missed simply because they usually see things from a different prospective. As for the bad part of creating a stone soup with a client or colleague, it is possible for you to veer away from what you are used to or what you've been taught, even if its against some kind of rules or you liking. After you get over the idea that some solutions won't always look like what you'd expect, you can think about your chance to incorporate your ideas, your artistic mark, your own ingredient to the soup.

Our recipe to our own stone soup included paper, tape, a t-shirt, cardboard, a hanger, more tape, safety pins, a rubber band, lovely heart eyes, and finally, a bunch of artistically creative cooks. There were so many ideas being tossed in the air (and into the pot) that I couldn't keep up with what everyone was suggesting. Finally, we all agreed that since it was October, we can work out a scarecrow out of our materials, I mean ingredients, we brought to the chopping board. The legs were made of paper cylinders, the body was a cardboard box, and a paper stuffed plastic bag wrapped in some type of cloth made up it's head. I was pretty happy with what my group had cooked up.