Siluetas

Cristi Rinklin, Visual Arts
Introduction to the Silhouette Project for Honors 299

      The stories, "The South" and "The Secret Miracle," by Jorge Luis Borges both allude to an internal, psychological world that perhaps exists between life and death. As these events may or may not be real, intangible forms, such as shadows, become effective visual metaphors to represent them. In this project, students used black paper cutout silhouettes to create a narrative image inspired from one of these two stories. Students were also asked to integrate text from the story into the image. In some cases, a single quote was highlighted, such as "In his dreams there was the rushing momentum of the train," in Joseph Kramkowski's piece, while in others the text became a patterned backdrop, as seen in the work of Marielle McKenna and Lauren Hammer . Students were drawn to the rich visual metaphors in the stories, such as the train in "The South" and the clock in "The Secret Miracle." Because the works of Borges offer rich and vivid imagery, his stories lend themselves beautifully to dynamic visual interpretations.