There is a lot you can learn about a person through a game of rock, paper, scissors.
Tarin Leach, University of Idaho senior art student, said that sharing characteristics with other people is as simple as rock, paper, scissors. One of Leach’s exhibits at her senior art show portrays this concept.
The exhibit contains two chairs that are set up at a table with some plants and paint pens. The people who sit there play a game of rock, paper, scissors with Leach and she explains the sharing of characteristics. She then has the participant take a rock from any of the rock cairns in her show and bring it back to her. Both Leach and the participant write down a one-word characteristic of themselves that they wished they shared with the other. Leach takes the participant’s rock and places it on a rock cairn somewhere in the room.
Leach got her start as an artist in high school. Her art teacher would sign her out of calculus classes and let her sit in on his art classes. Art was a way for her to get away for a bit, Leach said, and from there it became a release of emotions as well. Starting from that point, Leach thought of art as a cool thing, but not something that could be a job.
Leach originally went to school in 2006 for pre-medicine, because she wanted to help people.
“But then I met a boy and I wanted a family and I didn’t want to spend that much time away from my family,” Leach said.
She dropped out of college and had a son, now 4 and a half years old, and decided to go back to school for an art degree.
“I still wanted to help people, but art was very influential in my life,” Leach said. “I thought of putting the two together and do something like art therapy.”
Through research, Leach discovered a medium called social sculpture, which is art as a means of revolutionary change. The term was coined by an artist, Joseph Beuys, in the 1960s. It was helping people and still using art but not art therapy, Leach said.
“With (social sculpture), I didn’t have to defend myself,” Leach said. “That’s why I chose to do art. It made sense and I love it.”
Leach said she is inspired by the fundamentals of art itself. Lines, colors or energy and just the basics of art are exciting for Leach. There is a release of emotion when working with artistic media, Leach said.
“What excites me about what I do personally is the change that happens in the people I work with,” Leach said.
Leach tries to force mindfulness with engineered social situations and then use that mindfulness to inspire action. It is the actions after people experience mindfulness that inspire her, Leach said.
“(The people) have the potential to change lives and that is what I find to be important,” Leach said.
Leach’s senior show is a documentation of a pilgrimage she took last summer. She walked 170 miles of the wilderness of Idaho between Moscow and Boise. She said she did social sculpture projects with people along the way. It is all inspired by the idea of reducing conceptual violence so that physical violence can be reduced, she said.
“Each little project has its own immediate inspiration but they all have an overarching theme as well,” Leach said.
Leach plans on continuing her art after graduating this spring but it will be more of a sidebar to the work she will find.
“It’s the same old get out of college and find a job to pay the bills until you can get a job that you like,” Leach said. “I have no idea what I want to do when I grow up.”
Leach will be looking for a job in motivational speaking and doing social projects.
“I’ll be a motivational speaker with artistic intentions,” Leach said.
Claire Whitley
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