wrong,’” recalls McElroy, with a laugh. “I’ve got a
mob on my hands now!”
Don’t worry. She’s not laughing at anyone’s frustration, just at the thought of what happens next,
when she tells the students to take their papers and
mix them all together for a project they’ll be working on: the kids won’t do it.
“They started showing ownership,” says McElroy.
Even though her students hadn’t quite loved the
project, they weren’t ready to give away their hardearned squares of paper, or at least not the hard
work that went into them.
student in France, she found herself running into
walls with her thesis project, not least of all because
of the immense pressure to turn out something
amazing.
“There was a spiderweb right in front of my table,”
she says, recalling the time she spent watching it
sway and move with the breath of the room, trying
to figure out her next move.
“I realized it had everything I wanted to produce, it
was delicate, had age, the essence of where I was,”
she recalls.
Therein lies the lesson: no matter how mundane
or boring a task might seem, it’s what you put into
it that counts. The students take a step back from
mob rule, and come on board. They’re into it. The
class goes on to decide that they’ll use the squares
to make full-body suits that cover four of them
entirely, and wear them around the JSU campus,
which provokes Facebook posts, news attention
and passerby signing the slips of paper, taking their
own sense of ownership of the moment.
“That was the best time in my career, to see that it
wasn’t about a product, or a beautiful picture,” says
McElroy. “It was about those students taking ownership and thinking outside the box.”
McElroy’s attraction to “multilayered awesomeness”
stretches into her own work, which often features
natural materials re-used as art media, like her current project, a map of the United States painted
with pigment made from the dirt of each state.
The webs became something of an obsession. She
collected more than 100 webs while in France, and
they remain a common theme in many of her works
of art, from spiderwebs suspended between panes
of glass to drawings and paintings over which she
projects the webs and traces them onto the image,
creating organic, flowing overlays.
“I heat it, dry it out and put it in a coffee grinder,” she
says, pulling out a small, tin case that holds about
15 small vials of powdery dirt. Some are brown, but
others are grey, green, dark blue and, of course, red.
It looks like the vital essence of each state bottled
up and ready to go.
Other projects include busts papered in sections of
hornet’s nests and leaves that have unique patterns
eaten into them by Japanese beetles. McElroy’s directs our attention to things we may see every day
but seldom notice, a gift that she’s passing on to her
students at JSU, one 2x2 square at a time. It’s what
makes teaching so important to who she is and
what she does.
She’s also used another unlikely material in her
mixed media constructions: spiderwebs. While a
“I’m so glad I found it,” says McElroy of her career as
an educator. “It’s me.” ✤
INSIGHT
February 2014
31