After working tirelessly for six months, senior art major Jane McKenna completed her Eagle Scout project —a three-panel mosaic inspired by local Texas wildlife.
“I knew I wanted to do something art-related for my eagle project and so I had the idea to do something at McCallum,” McKenna said. “I went and talked to one of our art teachers, Mr. Cauthern, because he used to be a scout master and is very involved in his kids’ scout troop. I asked him if there was anywhere around McCallum in need of a mural or mosaic and he said that he had been wanting someone for a long time to put something on the wall outside.”
McKenna joined the Scouts in 2019, the year the program officially opened to girls.
“Me and my best friend from elementary school were going into different middle schools, but we wanted to stay friends and we found out that there was a troop in Austin which we really wanted to join,” McKenna said. “We ended up joining it together and we have been doing it ever since.”
Since then, McKenna has been completing various merit badges, helping out with community work and climbing the ranks leading up to the coveted Eagle Scout, the highest rank in the BSA program.
“There’s actually a lot of steps you have to take to make it to Eagle Scouts, as it is the highest rank you can get in the scouts,” McKenna said. “You have to show that you not only know outdoor skills, but leadership and communication skills. I am definitely more organized now and taking a more active role in my community.”
To obtain the rank of Eagle Scout, members must first complete an Eagle Scout project, demonstrating the leadership capabilities of the applicant. Although typically this includes community service projects, such as planting trees or building benches at a public park, McKenna decided to take an alternative path by designing a mosaic that would be displayed at McCallum. McKenna drew inspiration from the plants and animals around her for the mosaic design, which spanned three large panels.
“I wanted to bring in Texan wildlife into the piece, so I incorporated all of the birds and bugs that are native animals to Texas and also the live oak, as they are all over the McCallum campus,” McKenna said. “As I was making the project, I was looking around at all of the birds that were in our trees and on our bird feeders, so all of the birds that are in the mosaic are birds that I saw in my backyard.”
As it was a large-scale project, McKenna organized multiple workdays, collected donated materials and brought fellow scout friends to help with the many individual steps that go into creating a mosaic.
“First, I sketched out my design, then I went and started collecting materials, and got a lot of donations from family friends, local artists and Austin Creative Reuse, so it wasn’t too expensive to get all of the glass that I needed,” McKenna said. “I would then host work days where I would invite scouts and friends to come over to my house and work in my backyard, and we cut out tiles and lay them out, and then we made ceramic birds, which was cool because all of my friends picked a different bird, and it felt like they all got to leave their own mark on the piece.”
The hands-on process was grueling and laborious, but seeing the mosaic take shape kept McKenna motivated.
“My favorite part was seeing the whole thing come to life as I was laying out the tiles, but also all of my volunteers had different stuff that they had added to it, which was really cool,” McKenna said. “There are all of these swirls and designs in the background, which is not something that I had planned. It just kind of happened as people were laying out the tiles, and people were getting creative and fun with it. It all came out way better than I had planned.”
McKenna wanted the mosaic to be something lasting, a permanent addition to the campus from which she has grown so much.
“I wanted to leave my mark on McCallum,” McKenna said. “I wanted to make something that was going to be more permanent. As you know, paintings get torn down all the time and I thought it would be cool to do something that you actually can’t paint over.”
Art director Bill Cauthern, who has taught McKenna all four years of high school, was impressed by both her vision and her ability to lead the project to completion.
“She proposed everything, and did most of the process, I just helped with minor adjustments, such as the scale of it and where it was going to be displayed,” Cauthern said. “She just kept me informed of the progress.”
As McKenna was drafting her first designs, she had to get them approved first.
“I saw sketches of what it was going to look like beforehand, and it’s definitely more impressive than them,” Cauthern said. “As an art school, we should be having color and things on the walls that fit with what our mission is, which is to make art.”
Senior art major Evangeline Blackburn, who has known McKenna since middle school, also volunteered her time to help out with the project.
“She hosted multiple workdays, and I helped with cutting tiles, laying them, and putting them in designated places,” Blackburn said. “She also hosted a glazing day, where she had pre-made bird tiles that she sculpted by hand and I helped glaze some of those.”
As Blackburn is also an art major, she has taken many of the same art classes as McKenna and has seen her grow as an artist, moving further away from her comfort zone.
“My favorite parts of the process were seeing it all come together and watching Jane’s process, as this was a completely new thing for her,” Blackburn said. ”I had always wondered why there were so many blank spaces at McCallum, and I think that we need to start filling them up in the future, so this was a great start towards that goal.”
For McKenna, the finished mosaic represents not just her biggest accomplishment in scouting but also her growth as both an artist and a student.
“I wanted to do my project at McCallum because I wanted to give back to my school,” McKenna said. “As an artist at McCallum, I have grown so much through the art program. I am making stuff here that I could not have imagined that I would have been able to make when I first started here.”
