Susan Brown and Joan Hanley decided to make "mud murals" as a public art installation to engage the community in an art experience and conversation about lack, excess, and sustainability regarding world hunger, and to offer a way for each citizen to participate and make a difference. Together they worked in collaboration with Rooted in Clay and the High Mowing Cabin for peace and social justice.

Art auction to raise money, awareness of hunger
Students, teachers partner to sponsor event, make art installation

By Susan Lunt Childress
Published: Thursday, May. 24, 2007 Milford Cabinet (CABINET.COM)

WILTON — While many people worry about keeping enough gas in their tanks, others in the world can’t get enough to eat. That was the focus of nine High Mowing students and their English teacher, Diego Sharon, at a hunger conference last January.

“We had to choose a global call to action at the event,” Sharon said, “and we chose to work on poverty and specifically hunger.”

He said the students, members of the school’s “Cabin for Peace and Social Justice,” organized several fasts at the school, a private Waldorf high school located at the top of Abbott Hill Road in Wilton, encouraging students to skip lunch and write letters to their legislators concerning hunger-related-issues.

The group also collaborated with 14 local artists who agreed to donate their sculpture, photographs, water colors, oil paintings, drawings and fine furniture to be auctioned by silent bid at an exhibition work on Saturday, May 25.

Perhaps even more compelling than the art in the sale is the temporary art the group created to draw attention to the event. On the outside wall of the Main Street housing the Kundalini Yoga Studio and Art Gallery, students and artists collaborated to create a wall mural of six mud figures, outlined in chalk.

“We decided to make mud murals as a public art installation to engage the community in an art experience and a conversation about the lack, excess and sustainability regarding world hunger,” explained artist and teacher Susan Brown.

She said the mural, which they made out of tinted mud mixed with grass clippings, clay, wood ash and water that will eventually wash down into the garden below, was meant to “offer a way for each citizen to participate and make a difference.” The lively images — outlines of the students in different yoga poses — were meant as reminders that “each person can move to realize compassion and help relieve suffering,” Brown said.

So far it has worked, at least once. Brown said an anonymous donor sent over free pizzas for the group, with a message attached, saying that they were moved by the images and the students.

The artists whose works are for sale at the auction are Nancy Newstead, Kim Caruthers, Troy Stafford, Susan Brown, Joan Hanley, Dianna Normanton, Gary Pinnette, Johanna Landis, Diego Sharon, Aaron Brown, Karine Munk Finser, Susan Thompson, Carol Renwick, Daniel Saccardo.

Click here to view other public works by Susan and Joan.