Art 1010 – Found Object Art PROJECT
“Urtle the Turtle”
Peter Montgomery
July 18, 2012
“Urtle the Turtle”
My turtle started out as an idea from my summer vacation. My family vacationed in Hawaii this summer where I swam with turtles. In memory of this, I decided to create a turtle
Doing my research, I found about an ancient, mysterious type of turtle, the archelon. This was a gargantuan turtle that the ancient Greeks discovered and wrote about, but no further evidence has been found to support its existence. If it did exist, it has since gone extinct. I liked the thought of a giant sea turtle, and decided that my creation’s genus would be the archelon.
Named Urtle by my little brother, he is constructed with an umbrella, flip flops and flippers, paper plate caddies, hula hoops, and a wire basket. Also used were Christmas lights and a green jack-o-lantern snowman. The eyes are jar lids with black pine-wood-derby-car wheels in them. These items were hard to find, but fun to look for. Everything was connected either with needle and thread or hot glue.
I started out thinking I would use kitchen supplies, bowls and utensils to build my turtle. Those supplies were hard to come by and harder to connect with each other. After some failed attempts, I changed my plans when I saw an old umbrella missing one of its spokes. After replacing the missing spoke with a wire hanger, I began again, using the umbrella as a shell. When I found the paper plate caddies, those went on the umbrella to add texture and color. However, the umbrella was too weak to support all that weight on its own, so I grabbed two hula hoops to use for support. Sewing the hoops on the umbrella also changed the positioning of the caddies, so those came off and were re-attached.
The front fins came from a broken pair of flip flops, with the straps removed. Sewing these on was tricky, but I drilled two holes in the flip flops and sewed through these hole. The back fins are a pair of swim fins. The fins were made from a pliable plastic, so those were bent and adjusted so the thread wouldn’t slip off.
My head is a wire heart-shaped basket covered with a paper bag. The bag was similar to the paper plate caddies, so I added some chalk to the top to give some definition. The eyes were hot glued on this chalked surface. The tail was hard to find, but I eventually found a green jack-o-lantern tower, like a Halloween snowman. This was sewn on the back of the umbrella.
The Christmas lights seemed like a bonus to me. The lights were my last piece attached. I strung Urtle’s shell with the lights, and he became the mysterious archelon that was once the master of the sea.
Finding the proper pieces was challenging but exciting, and it got me to imagine everyday items used in unusual ways. It got me thinking more about structure and design. I greatly enjoyed this project and what I did with my supplies.
