Fitzalan High School West African Family Tree Totem Pole Project

Project Description

The preparation, design and manufacture of a West African Dragon Totem Pole is a project that will both inspire a positive team work ethos and challenge the individual to develop hand skills, creativity, environmental awareness and sense of purpose. These positive benefits are then interestingly and rewardingly displayed for others to experience thereafter.

The project group should as far as possible attend all of the workshops to obtain a basic understanding in West African history, culture and art. With this background the students are then encouraged to input their ideas to complete the Totem Pole design, learn the physical controls required to work the wood into its final form and benefit the personal achievement found by the successful project completion of the team. I have summarised these aspects further as follows.

The History and Meaning of Totem Poles

Workshops will provide the students with awareness about the history of Totem Pole culture. The meanings within the designs of totem poles are as varied as the cultures which make them. Totem Poles may recount familiar legends, clan lineages, or notable events. Some Totem Poles are erected to celebrate cultural beliefs whereas others are intended mostly as artistic presentations. Certain types of Totem Poles are part of mortuary structures incorporating grave boxes with carved supporting poles or recessed backs in which grave boxes were placed. Poles are also carved to illustrate stories, to commemorate historic persons, to represent shamanic powers or to provide objects of public ridicule.

As cultural artist I believed that Fitalan High school represent the Nine Primary Schools in Cardiff. These students come a family and go to family school and that make Fitzalan High to be family orientated school.
I am inspired with the idea for a Traditional School Family Tree Totem Pole.
This will represents all the students from all nine school and Fitzalan.
Workshop Outline

After familiarisation with the aims of the project, the group as a whole will design the Totem Pole to represent local experiences, values and history. Students’ imagination will be encouraged to visualise how the removal of unwanted wood will leave the design alive and how to translate the design onto to the raw wood.
We will use five and half metre Oak Tree, eighty centimetres diameters,
three tones weight.

This piece with such a diameter and height, we will be able to carve in ten different mask faces and heads, that may represents different students, nine schools and Fitzalan.

The Project Plan of Action for the West African Family Tree Totem Pole design can be seen by clicking here >>