Workshop bucket designs

On Thursday, 5.3.12 Gabe Akagawa taught a workshop in Heather Coffey's Ceramics class at Harold Washington. These designs for bucket uses are by the students who participated in the workshop.

Exhibition installed at Harold Washington College

Buckets were installed with actual boards from my backyard fence. The buckets function in my household and garden as a tool within the larger macro ecosystem. In the gallery, a micro ecosystem within each bucket is created inferring the counterpoint. Pictured, curator Vanessa Smith noting contents.

Buckets' contents: mostly compostable materials

Most buckets have within them two material: one compostable, one not. 

Coffee and plastic ice.

TP roll cores

Egg shells and clay

Dryer lint and acorns.

Used match sticks and rubber bands from local newspaper.

Last years' tomato plant

Yellow and white onion and garlic skins

paper shreddings and pencils

Sunflowers

existing designs for bucket uses

Post-it drawings by Gabe Akagawa

A Garden by Design exhibition Press Release

This blog as a bucket.

This blog will serve to collect and store ideas for using 5 gallon buckets. Brainstorming and building workshops will further serve as real world actions to help propel the idea that simple objects can help change our perceptions of and interactions with the world and people around us.
An exhibition at the President's Gallery at Harold Washington College beginning March 19th will exhibit buckets as site for installation by this blog's author, Gabriel Bizen Akagawa.

The Vessel

I use 5 gallon buckets as containers for their functional properties to hold and transport.  These vessels not only invite the user to imagine its possibilities, but entice the passer-by to peer past its lip to inspect its contents. The vessel determines a space that separates itself from its surroundings. It is both object and membrane. Do the boundaries of the vessel artificially contain and distinctly differentiate contents from the rest of our world? Or does the vessel define a fabricated and tenuous relationship between the the viewer and their imagination?