Doria Anne Spiegel
PORTFOLIO Non-Architecture Background Work Completed 2017-2019
Table of Contents Drawings 1. Introduction 2. Childhood Home Murals 3. Changing Seasons 4. Sankofa 5. Promoting Literacy Furniture 6. Kitchen 7. 450 School Desks 8. ICT Lab and Library 9. Bottle End Tables 10. Tree Bed
1. All but two pages of this portfolio displays work completed during my Peace Corps service in rural Ghana from 2017-2019, so please note that some pictures are not of the highest quality. Much of my creative expression during service happened throughout training in Accra and Kumasi, as I need to draw in order to listen for long periods of time. Hence, my language and teacher-training notebooks are filled with doodles like this one here. Doodles are an underlying theme of this portfolio and pages from my training notebooks are the background of each page. I chose this theme because all the work displayed in this portfolio started as just a doodle. It exemplifies how I think and create.
2. My childhood home had been an early inspiration for architecture. I drew this view from the ground using softlead pencils after returning from post-service travels about a month ago as my mother prepares to move away to a new house. I left it partly unshaded to keep focus on the structure and layers of the house and accordingly, to easily occlude furniture and household appliances.
3. To curb homesickness during my service, I covered my bedroom walls with murals reminding me of home, often incorporating Adinkra symbols, traditional Ghanaian symbols. This mural shows a tree in between summer and autumn, the changing of the seasons being something I missed dearly. I painted the owl after my grandfather died halfway through my service; I was unable to attend his funeral and owls were his favorite bird. There are two Adinkra symbols shown in blue: “Owuo Atwedee,” meaning “ladder of death” for mortality and “Mmere Dane,” literally “time changes,” representing the ephemerality of life situations, both good and bad.
4. “Sankofa” translates literally to “go back and get it” and is traditionally represented by a bird retrieving an egg she had earlier forgotten. On my bedroom wall in Ghana, I painted this Adinkra (traditional Ghanaian) symbol hidden in Portugueseinspired tiles after a trip to Portugal with my mother as a daily reminder to go back and retrieve that which is forgotten, not to wallow in failures of yesterday but to learn from them and carry on. The fact that this mural happened to match my chamber pot was a bonus.
5. I started “Art Club� at my school to provide artistically inclined students a chance to act as community leaders using their skills, with the end goal of painting educational murals in the community. As literacy development was one of the community’s greatest needs, we painted this mural on the KG school using funds from a food security grant (hence the food items). Even before we finished, adults and children alike would pass by and practice using the pictures to identify the words and learn the associated letter sound.
6. In Ghana, I made most of my own furniture using the resources available. This table is made of teak branches fastened with rope acquired by stripping the underlayer of bark from a certain tree and soaking it in water. The shelf on the kitchen counter/repurposed computer lab table is made in a similar fashion while the shelf shown below behind the table is made of branches, repurposed dividers from the same computer lab table and is suspended with thin, synthetic rope. I used stumps leftover from the trees felled for desk construction (see next page) as stools, shown below.
7. When I first arrived in my community, the lack of desks in the local schools was a clear obstacle in the students’ education. Children spent the whole school day on the ground, exposing them to illnesses tracked in by shoes and impeding their learning due to the unstructured nature of the classroom, lack of writing surfaces and physical discomfort. In response, I allocated grant funding, collaborated with school teachers and the PTA to construct 400 desks and repair over 50 more using primarily local natural and human resources. I also provided the schools with tools and training for future desk maintenance. This picture shows pupils at the primary school taking ownership and learning new skills assisting with the construction of their desks.
8. ICT (Information and Communication Technology) was one of the subjects I taught at the JHS. It was nearly impossible for students to truly learn the topic as there were no computers to access. So, as one of my final projects, I used the leftover boards from the desk project to build bookshelves and ICT tables with a student helper who is now in charge of their maintenance. As I left, teachers purchased used books and computers with money from a fundraiser and transformed my former house into an ICT lab and library.
9. As previously stated, I made most of my own furniture while living in Ghana using the resources available. Two pieces that received much attention from visitors were side tables that incorporated old wine and beer bottles that I had collected from gettogethers with other Peace Corps volunteers. The one pictured below uses neem branches, small nails, wine bottles and scrap wood and it was used for playing cards mostly by students visiting for office hours. The one on the right is composed of beer bottles, teak branches, rope from tree bark and a scrap of wood. I used it display magazines by the latrine .
10. In the months leading to my departure for Peace Corps service, I built a tree bed using broken pallets and logs from a random, felled tree. My boyfriend used a chainsaw to cut the logs where I had measured. I repaired pallets, sanded and drilled holes in the pallets, and drilled and secured wooden dowels in the logs to make the bed easy to put together and take apart. It was beautiful once finished, but unfortunately the logs were infested with bore worms and so the logs were disposed of. Having learned my lesson about random logs, my uncle felled a cherry tree for me and has been drying the logs through my whole service. Soon, this tree bed will be rebuilt, better than ever before.