Hunting Hills High School art students are using their creativity to help the less fortunate in Red Deer.
The students have built bowls out of clay and decorated them, with the intention of putting them up for sale.
During the Empty Bowls event, students will be selling their artwork for $15 or more for each bowl on Tuesday from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. in the gathering area at Hunting Hills High School at 150 Lockwood Ave.
As part of the event, people will have soup in their bowls along with a bun. At the end of the event, participants take the bowl home.
“The idea is to keep the bowl as a reminder of the empty bowls around the world and keep the spirit of giving alive all year,” said Allan MacIntyre, one of the art teachers at the school who worked on the project, along with art teacher Carrie Waldo.
The Empty Bowls project started in the United States in the 1990s, when an art teacher from Michigan wanted to raise money to feed the hungry. It has expanded since then to help collect donations for the homeless all over the world.
It’s the first time Hunting Hills students have taken part. Their bowls range from the sophisticated to the funky, everything from an African motif to baroque-looking design.
One student made a cow that opens up, with an udder and feet, another bowl looks like a bathtub and another is a pirate ship. The only limit to the students’ creativity was that the bowl had to be functional.
The students worked on the bowls over a two-month period, putting upwards of six hours into each bowl’s creation. Students built the bowls by hand out of clay and decorated them.
Courtney Bonnell, a Grade 12 student at Hunting Hills High School, was one of the young artists who worked on the project, creating a large blue bowl with swirls all over it.
“Everybody really enjoyed it because we just kind of went with an idea and it wasn’t really cut and dried. You could do whatever as long as it met the function requirement. So we would walk around and look at each other’s. It was a great idea and it was really a good class experience,” Bonnell said.
There will be 100 bowls up for grabs during the Empty Bowls event and organizers hope to raise around $1,500 to go towards organizations that help feed the hungry in Red Deer.
sobrien@www.reddeeradvocate.com