Emily Chiavelli
AP Lit
Mr. Gallagher
12 October 2008
Metacognition: Memoir Project
Initially, I was sure I would complete either the book cover or the soundtrack for this paper; I was thankful we finally had creative alternatives to writing essays or explications.
In my art class I’ve been focusing on emulating the work of David Hockney and Jeremy Wolff by creating photo-collages. I decided that the same process might work for this assignment; only instead of using my own photographs, I would cut small pieces out of magazines to form a full (if slightly distorted) image for the new book cover.
My first attempt at this looked fabulous until I ruined it. I got stumped when it came to creating the sky, and I completely destroyed the thing in trying to fix my mistakes. On the second attempt, I faired slightly better in creating a background, although I stupidly tried to glue the background onto the mountain instead of creating the mountain on the background, which made the project look slightly lumpy and more poorly constructed.
My vision for the cover was to symbolically demonstrate the increasingly dangerous areas of Mount Everest. I started with green pieces of paper near the bottom of the mountain, to represent grass. As I created the higher areas of the mountain, I progressed upward from rocky to snowy to icy; finally, near the top of the mountain, is the vertical, technically challenging “death zone,” which I demonstrated with an image of a smooth rock. I added a lighting bolt near the top to demonstrate the oncoming of the storm that killed many of the climbers on the expedition.