Suspended Short Story

For my short story I chose "The One's Who Walk Away From Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin. This short story is set in a city called Omelas, which is presented as somewhat of a utopia, where all of the residents appear to be happy and prosperous. As the story begins, the Festival of Summer is taking place in the city and the narrator describes the joyous celebrations that the people enjoy and the town appears to be the epitome of perfection until the story quickly turns dark and morbid as the narrator reveals the secret that lies at the core 

of the city. A child is being held prisoner in a small, dark basement room in the heart of the town of Omelas. The child, who may have a disability or a deformity that sets it apart from the rest, is left alone in the basement except for very brief intervals when other people come to leave food and water. Although the child begs for release, it is always ignored and kept at the brink of death. The residents of Omelas know of the child but choose to live on with their happy lives. Some are taken to see the child and some go willingly, and they usually react with disgust and shock. However, they are told that if the child is freed, the society of Omelas will collapse, and everything that is good about the city will disappear. Most of the residents accept the situation and decide that the good of the many outweighs the good of the one. On occasion, though, a resident cannot live with this and decide to leave. They walk out of town toward the mountains and never comes back. 

Le Guin's story deals with the moral question of whether a society can live happily, knowing they are doing so at the cost of another's inhumanity. 

Materials used:
-Paper
-Artificial Flowers
-Glass Box

For my sculpture I chose to depict the surrounding mountains of Omelas because I took them to be a very significant aspect of the story. The mountains were what seemed to keep the "perfect" town from the rest of the world, and the few who walked away left through the mountains. The mountains are made out of paper and the tops are spray painted gold. When first reading the short story I saw the clash of summer time and happiness, with darkness. To depict the season of summer I chose to use artificial sunflowers. I wanted to use artificial flowers to symbolize the artificial aspects of Omelas. I spray painted the top flowers yellow and they ranged in size, symbolizing the citizens of Omelas, and the happy lives they supposedly were living. The flowers where arranged in an oval shape because as the narrator described Omelas, I saw it as an oval town with surrounding mountains. The top part of the piece is happy and bright, leading to a dark underground that leads to a single black sunflower that symbolizes the poor child that has been shunned from civilization. The black sunflower is incased in a glass box to show how fragile the happy town of Omelas actually is. The sense of perfection that the town thrives on could all be shattered by the one sunflower.

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