”Your body is your clay home.
The body is sacred and a mirror where the secret life of the soul finds expression.”
(O’Donohue – Anam Cara)
I have been putting of my plan to experiment with clay sculpting. Mainly due to the fact that I didn’t have studio space for the most part of Unit 1.1. I finally got round to playing and making a small clay sculpture.
Working with the clay is such a therapeutic experience. The artwork I love making the most are the one’s where I can use my own hands as the tools and where this get messy. I love how a sculpture can be built up and then carved into. It’s one of the most natural materials one can work with – the earth.
I based this sculpture on the gentleman called Michael whom met in Slabs-town (although he looks a bit more serious in the sculpture than in real life!). I loved his strong features, his little hat and the story behind his life. The hardship that must come with living in a place like Slabs-town, with minimal income cannot be easy to bare, yet what I experienced in that community was proof that a person’s attitude and choice of focus can change the course and quality of your life. The flower in his hat points to the fact that in spite of his circumstances, he still chooses to focus on beauty and looks to find beauty around him.
I had this idea of making a sculpture and cutting a house-shaped piece into it’s chest. I wanted to cut straight through and though that it would be fantastic if one could somehow project an image/animation/line drawing through the sculpture and onto the wall/surface behind it. It was just a wild idea but once I started this little 12cm tall sculpture, I decided to experiment with it. I thought it would help me communicated the idea that our identity influences the places around us and by drawing onto my sculpture (which I will do after it has dried) point to the idea that place has influence on our identity.
The images below will hopefully communicate how it developed. Starting with the shoulders and head, it was built up fairly quickly in about 1-2 hrs, working from a few photographs and intuitively adding what I felt was needed. I enjoyed creating texture and an imperfect surface.
Once the clay was a bit dryer, I cut out the house-shape on both the front and back of the chest. I placed it in different settings and eventually loved the foam box that was picked up from our building site during our house renovation. This seemed to give the sculpture the perfect resting place. I placed a mobile phone with it’s flashlight on, below the sculpture so that it could light up it’s chest from the inside and shine through the cut-out.
With the house shapes creating a hole straight through the chest of the sculpture, I wanted to see if I could find a piece of transparency to draw on and mount it to the house cut-out. Playing around with a light source, I tried to shine the light from within as well as through the front. Shining the light from the front of the sculpture focusing on the cut-out house shape, caused a reflection of the transparency with miniature line drawing onto the surface behind it.
I enjoyed the result and the narrative potential of the experiment. The reflection of the transparency drawing, pointing to what home means to him. In this case it might mean that his perception of home is directly linked to children.I was intrigued by the outcome and hope the photo’s will show the various experiments clearly.
One experiment that failed but is worth mentioning is when I tried to project my short animation (from a previous post) onto a surface using a magnifying glass and my phone in a dark room. If it worked, it would be wonderful to try and project an animation THROUGH the house-shaped cut-out in my sculpture and onto the surface behind it. Perhaps this would only work on a bigger scale but I love the potential of it. My video of the failed experiment is shown below. The quality is poor due to the darkness of the room I was in and you cannot see the phone I am lining up behind the magnifying glass but hopefully it will give the idea behind the experiment. I plan to find a more successful way of doing it.
Below are some more photo’s of where I ‘lined’ the inside of the house cut-out with 0.5mm copper plate. I was able to cut these pieces into the shape I needed. As mentioned in previous posts as well as in my contextual study for this unit, in my artwork, copper symbolises our human need for love and belonging and I wanted to incorporate it into this sculpture to communicate this idea.
I look forward to working with clay and sculpture more often and perhaps on a bigger scale. I was however very rewarding to be able to make a small and quick sculpture to test ideas.
This sculpture compliments the oil sketch in my visual journal of Slabs-Town where I met Michael:
