If you happen to be strolling through downtown Hamilton and notice a little more artistic charm, it’s all thanks to Hamilton High School art students.
Photo above shows HHS student Emma Mitchell supervising fellow students hanging sculptures in the window of Big Creek Coffee Roasters.
This past week they installed sculptures with the help of art teacher, Daniele Vickers at Chapter One Book Store, The Paper Clip, Big Creek Coffee Roasters, and Montana Bliss Artworks.
The students have been working on the sculptures for several months. The themes center around pop culture and movies.
Hamilton High School students Emma Mitchell says “We wanted to do Harry Potter and it’s from Harry Potter the Phoenix in the 5th movie."
Hamilton High School student Savannah Cob says, “We wanted something super different and out of the ordinary, so we did a phoenix and what we made it out of was wire, Paper Mache, tissue paper, chicken wire and we just made that al into a fantastic bird.”
Mitchell says, “It also kind of represents rebirth for the month of January because it’s the new year and so that’s why we kind of wanted to do the phoenix for rebirth.”
Photo above shows "The Phoenix" sculpture by Emma Mitchell and Savannah Cobb displayed at Chapter One book store.
Hamilton High School student Alyssa McWhirter says, “This is from a movie by Studio Ghibli and it’s called “how’s moving castle” and I watch a lot of those movies I really like them. They are just creative and beautiful pieces of art. So that’s just like this big mechanical that’s all jenky and falling apart and these magical beings live inside of it. We’ve been working on it for about 2 months, every other day for two months and so it would be like building the different parts of it like the feet, the main body, the houses individually, and then putting it all together with Paper Mache."
Photo above shows the sculpture created by Alyssa McWhirter and Eva Ziegler displayed at Montana Bliss Artworks.
Local Artist and owner of Montana Bliss Artworks, Barbara Liss has been working with HSD#3 art students for years through the emerging student artist program.
She loves to see student works throughout downtown and encourages the community to always embrace art within our schools.
Liss says “Being artistic helps you come up with creative solutions. All businesses are going to have some problems or something they need to work through, and the creative part of your mind helps you come up with creative solutions for whatever your business is.”
The student sculptures will be on display throughout the month of January.