UW-Stout art major Elizabeth Lee is the first to admit that making art out of tape is “kind of a weird concept.” But one has to admit that it can produce some amazing results. Elizabeth was recently crowned the grand prize winner of 3M’s Off the Roll Tape Sculpture Contest, a contest in which all entries had to be created purely from packaging tape. Elizabeth’s sculpture, entitled Can I Keep Him?, took the form of a giant version of her pet goldfish and college companion Jimmy. “They’re pretty cute,” she says, “and I thought it’d be pretty cool to make a bigger one. I also thought that I could do a goldfish justice with the sculpture being clear.” After sculpting the fish, Elizabeth applied stained glass paint to give the fish striking orange highlights and color in its eyes. She thinks that her use of color, along with the very realistic depiction of the fish (complete with “I won it from the fair” bag) is what caught the judges’ eyes. Winning the contest earned Elizabeth $5,000, which she plans to put towards her tuition, and 36 rolls of packaging tape, which may be put to use building another sculpture. Elizabeth says she likes the medium quite a bit, although working with tape does have its difficulties. “It gets stuck everywhere,” she says. “It takes a lot of getting used to.”