Eighteen students had the opportunity to showcase their creativity the green way at the third annual Biorenewables Art Contest.

“For three years, we’ve been having art come in on or around Earth Day,” said Maddison Sieck, editorial assistant of the Bioeconomy Institute. “Because we’re [the biorenewables research laboratory], we want the pieces to have some sort of biorenewable aspect to them.”

Winners of the contest received cash prices provided by the Bioeconomy Institute.

Sean Roper’s sculpture “Metamorphosis” won best in show and will become part of the Bioeconomy Institute’s yearlong gallery. The sculpture will be on public display in the Biorenewables Research Laboratory.

“I was exploring how warmth and movement can relate to biorenewables, the change of either materials, the change of ideas. I used color and texture to emphasize that,” said Roper, senior in art and design.

The sculpture is ceramic, made with items such as feldspar, a common rock-forming material.

First-place winner Celinda Stamy, graduate student in art and design, expresses society’s use and impact of vehicles through her painting “Oil and Rust.”

“I picked a biorenewable that a lot of people would be familiar with, that they would use every day and maybe not be aware of it,” Stamy said.

Third-place winners Reed Counts and Blake Evans chose something with a sense of practicality.

“Desk Hammock” is a chair constructed of recycled paper tubes and leftover plywood. 

“We did a little bit of research and we saw that there was the construction method of seam seam, the holes in the plywood as kind of a way of sticking them together, and we decided to do a different method of construction and try to make a hammock and make it a fluid, form-fitting chair,” Counts said, senior in architecture.

All students interested in participating in next year’s contest must be registered in a College of Design class next spring, during the duration of the contest.