Stone Soup

I’m sure we’ve all heard of the Stone Soup Fable since childhood about a soldier coming home from war and trying to make soup out of a rock. Eventually, curious town folks pass by and each decide to add carrots, lettuce, seasoning, and other foods into the pot; thus, the stone soup is made!

Inspired by this old story, students from Housefield’s DES001 class were assigned to bring random materials and objects from their homes to compile together and create a “stone soup,” although this one is not actually edible. My group brought glitter, glue, paintbrushes, cardboard, feathers, scrapbook paper, and a soda bottle. Without a clue of what we were going to make, we simply picked up the pieces and began assembling it all together. And this is what we created…

All photos by Diane Wu

Staring at each other, we had no idea what our creation was. Eventually someone blurted out, “It looks like a dead parrot that crashed into a tree.” As a result, we named our artwork Parrot’s Funeral. It is interesting to see how by sticking completely random and irrelevant objects together, we can create a work of art. This “stone soup” project didn’t require us to portray a specific idea, but after completing the activity, our group leader Cody Torgersrud, explained that as an artist, no matter how ridiculous our work looks in the end, the most important skill is to have the ability to explain and defend it. There will always be people out there critiquing an artist’s work, thus, as a designer, one must refine our ability to speak and acquire the skill to sell our work to the public.