Creating Darwin, My Lovely Paper Mache Pigeon

For my Final "Performance" I opted instead to create rather than to perform. Darwin, the large paper mache pigeon that you all saw in class, is the final product. My presentation was very short, but that is because I really wanted to just present the fruit of my labor and make sure the bigger groups had enough time to perform their presentations. He took 5 days in all to make. First, I applied strips of newspaper dipped in a flour/water mixture to the exterior of two inflated balloons(one for the head and one for the body). I let that dry for 24 hours before attaching the two with newspaper, tape, and superglue. Then I started painting his head and neck. After letting the paint dry, I painted his eyes and made a beak out of newspaper and superglued it to his face. Then I started applying all of the feathers that I cut out from cardstock and newspaper to create his lovely plummage. Once that was done I touched up the paint and used about a half a bottle of rubber cement to securely attach him to the base. Then I made a nest for him out of easter grass and covered the rest f the base with more of his feathers. Finally I wrote the name of a book or literary creation on each of his cardstock wings.

What I wanted to represent with Darwin was the combination of where I started with this class and where I ended. I wanted to make a sort of ouroboros. SO for me, we started with Darwin and his horrible pigeons and we ended with the universal apply of stories. I hope my pigeon combined these two well. I also wanted to make the point that there is a lot of controversy about which is better: history or fiction. And I want to argue that neither is more important, if you can get the same meaning from a history as you can from a novel, it therefore does not matter whether what you are reading is "true". A lot of people struggle with this idea, and I wanted to leave the class thinking about it.