Pencil Sculpture Makes a Point at UNH

UNH Students Create Pencil Sculpture That Mirrors Student Debt

We have featured many fantastic pencil artists who create everything from realistic pencil drawings, to tiny sculptures (Dalton Ghetti, Hungarian artist Cerkahegyzo) to large-scale pencil artwork (Jennifer Maestre). While you can argue (and many do) that all art is political, I have never seen a piece of pencil artwork that has had such an overt political message as the pencil sculpture recently unveiled by students at the University of New Hampshire.

32,000 pencils have been painstakingly sculpted into a graduation cap – one pencil for each dollar of student loan debt that a typical UNH student will graduate with at the end of their undergrad program. The sculpture, created by the UNH Peace and Justice League in concert with local sculptor Tim Gaudreau, has been designed to call attention to the mounting tuition costs facing college students – New Hampshire has the highest in-state tuition rates in the country – and to lobby senators at the state assembly for more affordable and accessible education.

The sculpture isn’t just an artistic endeavor; it was designed using no glue, so the pencils can be distributed to local schools when the project is complete. In the meantime, this one-of-a-kind piece of pencil artwork will travel the state to inspire dialogue and, hopefully, reform.

Pencil artwork isn’t typically overtly political, but with college students across the country feeling the pressure of excessive student loans and scarce economic opportunities, it isn’t surprising that the UNH students have turned to a unique medium to express their frustrations. A pencil evokes many things, but for me, the bright yellow #2 pencils evoke a certain sense of innocence and hope – after all, they were the first thing pressed into our chubby fingers when we were kids, and they became the medium through which we engaged our education. Math, the sciences, language, writing, history – it all flowed from the tip of that cheery yellow pencil. We’ve written before here that a pencil is a tool of an endless possibility, and it seems that college students throughout the United States – and especially, it seems, at the University of New Hampshire – have found that the promise of endless possibility has been thwarted.

As a recent college graduate myself, I can identify with their frustrations. No one I know is asking for a job and a salary on a silver platter, but it is frightening when the script that you have been told to follow your whole life – go to school, go to college, graduate, get a job – doesn’t have the ending that you thought it would. I don’t want to clamber atop a soapbox, but it seems to me that the pencil is a perfect symbol to capture the fear, frustration, and hope that many college students are feeling right now. It’s less accessible, in some ways, than realistic pencil drawings might be, and yet from my perspective it captures the anger and fear of a generation better than any realistic pencil drawings ever could. I am sure that this piece of pencil artwork doesn’t speak for everyone – what piece of art ever does? – but for college students around the United States, it may very well make a salient and timely point.

We want to hear your thoughts – what does the choice of pencils as a material for this sculpture say to you? Be sure to check out our gallery of pencil artists, whose works run the gamut from surreal pencil sculpture to realistic pencil drawings, as well as our drawing lessons for tips on creating some realistic pencil drawings of your own. Make sure you leave your comments below!