What is Sculpture? [Creating my Comforter 2]

The more I carried the ‘mod-rock-mitt’ the more familiar I got with it, I found carrying it against my chest was the way I felt most secure with it. Like this:

This position inspired me to cast my own hand in mod rock so that my sculpture could replicate the cradling position of my hand when it holds the mitt to my chest.

Here Kevin stepped in to help me create a final piece worthy mod rock cast.

The mould looked great however the mod rock hand wasn’t large enough to fit the mod rock mitt alongside it meaning I couldn’t have them fitted together as a sculpture.

I abandoned that idea and turned to my other thoughts about how I could make the mitt more like a child’s security blanket or favourite teddy and so I set about making it more purpose friendly.

To make the overall feel of the mitt softer and smoother I covered it in batting. At this point I was really starting to connect with the mitt and it was bringing up emotions from when my mum was no longer living with my family and would send me letters and cards telling me she would be coming home and that she loved me.

I decided to follow this feeling and started writing small notes with some of her phrases on them.

I started of by folding the notes and then as I got more upset I decided to scrunch them up; cliched maybe but it felt like what the words deserved.

I then pushed all the notes through the hole in the bottom of the mitt, putting the scrunched balls last.

I sealed the hole.

The only evidence of the notes is a slight noise when you shake the mitt which I think is appropriate since they will only be discovered through thorough physical exploration by someone who wants to learn what their eyes can’t show them which I guess harks back to my original concept of hiding and covering something.

The mitt was then covered in a red fuzzy soft material and assumed its role as a comforter and a vessel of emotion.

What is Sculpture? [Creating my Comforter]

This is me. I’m wearing rubber gloves because I was briefly considering what it is to feel wet things when your hands aren’t physically getting wet. I’ve found something on my friend Michaels desk. It’s a mod-rock cast of one of his hands. I’m holding it to my ear because I’ve already explored how it’s surface feels, how the shape feels and I wanted to hear it.

I found his ‘mod-rock-mitt’ on his desk and started playing with it, then decided that this was the perfect object.

I had been wandering the studio looking for an object or several objects that I could combine so that if someone without sight would feel it they wouldn’t immediately be able to guess what they were holding. They would have to explore it though their other senses.

The mitt that Michael eventually said I could keep was perfect for baffling my unsuspecting friend Rebecca.

After I blindfolded her I placed the mitt in her hands and she felt it, tapped it, sniffed it, and, when prompted listened to it in a similar way to how I do in the picture.

What is Sculpture? [Research and Ideas 3]

Prior to the start of this project I had found a child’s primary school work book; square, yellow and full of exciting illustrations. The owner of the workbook (Lola) had completed said workbook and I was curious to see how well she had done.

Some of the exercises were classic letter learning, where an example letter was written in a faint outline and she had to continue writing the letter unaided. She seemed to do okay with these, however some of the letters near the end of each line became clumsy and oversized as she rushed to finish or got bored of concentrating.

And exercise near the end of the book struck me are very difficult, she had put answers for all of the ‘word sums’ however many of them I didn’t recognise as words.

A word sum followed this format:

[letter] + [pictorial representation of an object] = new word

Sometimes the beginning letter was a letter that had been crossed out. I found myself genuinely struggling at the beginning to complete these ‘sums’. I thought the little pictures of an ink bottle or spinning top and the crossed out letters representing a letter that had to be taken away from the spelling of the work represented by a the pictures a complex concept for a 5 or 6 year old to grasp.

Lola got many of the answers wrong and at some points she was just scribbling circles in the answer spaces.

For me, Lola’s frustration and state of ignorance to the language we all as fluent communicators take for granted was an insight into what life must have been like for us all pre-basic education.

I remembered back to a BBC radio programme that was talking about some languages not having specific words for some feelings or concepts like frustration and how if one doesn’t know the word frustration then how can you feel/identify/distinguish the feeling of frustration. Therefore how do you define what a young child is feeling and can they feel complex emotion?

My guess is that they probably can, however when you can’t communicate or define those emotions or thoughts (past a very basic level of happy or sad/angry which can be defined by a babies cry or lack) then these complexities of emotion simply don’t matter, or can’t be understood enough analyse and cope with them.

I started to consider how Lola’s frustration would look and feel if it were a physical object. The first thing I made to describe this wasn’t very complex, i thought knots would communicate her confusion.

I tore a white piece of fabric into long strips and started looping and knotting them until I had an asymmetrical messy, straggly clump of material.

I tried writing some of the sums on the fabric, however I wasn’t able to achieve the accuracy of the printed letters in the book with any pens and considered a different avenue instead…

Like the soft cast of my torso this knotted piece of fabric had a physical appeal to me. It reminded me of the frayed fabric ‘stick’ that my dogs at home tug and play with. I remembered I could potentially create a sculpture that carries some of its value in its physical appeal rather than visual appeal.

My dogs toy: ‘Stick’

Video of me playing with my dog toy the same way I pretend to be a dog when I’m playing with my dogs at home.

What is Sculpture? [Research and Ideas 2]

Moving on from the idea of covering and hiding forms I started pursuing a concept I had been considering since the last CAP project. Creating the form of a body out of a more unusual material; broken glass. A quick search other internet showed that a few other artists had created very similar sculptures.

Sue Tilley’s glass body forms made from fragmented glass were closest to what I had envisioned, she doesn’t tend to colour her works, letting the original qualities of the materials show.

“She aims to create a piece which attracts the viewer with its aesthetics, and leads them to consider and acknowledge the issue being explored.”

I wanted similar, my aim in using multicoloured bits of broken glass and mirror to create the shape of my body was to represent the growth and fragility and beauty of how we grow and change with our individual life experiences

I went about making a cheap and disposable cast of my body out of cling film and duck tape.

The duck tape mould was cut off and then stuffed with soft toy stuffing.

Having made this cast of my body I enjoyed dressing it and hugging it.

I soon found that gluing the small bits of glass together to fit around my body was far more difficult than I anticipated as the glass didn’t hold together when there was minimal structural pressure and I found myself losing interest in this idea too, feeling like it was far too obvious.

However the comfort and need for comfort and the artificial emotion that the squishy cast evoked stayed with me as I continued on to my next idea.

What is Sculpture? [Research and Ideas 1]

Noémie Goudal on how she presented her photography in Edel Assanti. – SOURCE Issue 95

“For me the body has a very important place in the exhibition space.”

Consideration for the people who will see your work needs to extend past your art and include how it’s displayed and subsequently documented.

http://noemiegoudal.com/soulevement/

Jeanne-Claude & Christo

“Revelation through concealment.”

– David Bourdon

Pont Neuf 1975-1985 (http://www.rudedo.be/amarant07/het-nouveau-realisme/christo-vladimirov-javacheff-1935/christo-the-pont-neuf-wrapped-paris-1975-1985/christo30/)

During our introductory lecture we were shown pictures of statues that had been covered in black plastic and we were asked if they were still sculptures. I was in two minds, I thought that they were beautiful when they were wrapped up and felt they could constitute as sculptures, however if the wrapping was borne out of utility then they were not sculptures.

Unlike the examples of wrapped sculptures given by Kevin, Christo & Jeanne-Claude’s wrapping of the Pont Neuf doesn’t hide the bridge and obscure its form. On the contrary the wrapping compliments the bridge and feels more like a beautiful Grecian maiden clad in rippling material rather than the shoddy packaging of a corpse.

https://zamos.livejournal.com/16326.html

I briefly experimented with wrapping a form in plastic to see if the idea inspired anything more than curiosity. I quickly made a house of cards, glueing the structure together so I could work with it and then wrapped and partially wrapped the house in a long black strip of black plastic.

The fairly basic triangular shape of the house of cards wasn’t irregular enough when it was covered and so my attempt to intrigue myself or a potential viewer failed and I decided to pursue a different avenue.

What is Sculpture? [Introduction]

What I initially gathered from Kevin’s project introduction…

1. Sculpture can be found objects.

2. Not all objects are sculptures.

3. Distinguishing between what is sculpture and what is not is tricky and fluid; maybe the only guide is your intentions for the work.

4. You are the first audience of your own work, however there will always be a second audience and you should consider them. Or should you?

5. Sculpture can appeal to multiple senses not just sight.

6. Sculpture can be ephemeral creations so the documentation of such events/sculptures should be thorough.

Documentation:

Our project requires us to present only documentation of our sculpture. Good documentation should…

1. Give a sense of the journey you took in creating the work (research and experimentation).

2. Showcase the work.

Documentation could come in the form of an art booklet, folded leaflet, piece of text and supporting images, blog post or in some other format. It can include items and objects that were part of your work that are important within the context of your work however may not be special in themselves.

Something interesting that Kevin did in our lecture was to describe and display the documentation for a piece of work he performed. He described an experience he had with a hedgehog; holding it while baking a loaf of bread the size of said hedge hog in his garden for about 4 hours.

The detailed and convincing nature of documentation allowed us to believe that he had in fact sat in his garden for hours holding a hedgehog waiting for loaf of bread to bake.

This was in fact not true. He did no such thing, and thus demonstrated the power documentation. It is a way to convince those who did not see, that there was once art and how it was to see the art.