Saturday, January 25, 2014

Limp noodle




Still debating whether or not I want this to stand of its own accord. It's kind of cheeky and works with the concept. I still need to tidy up those places where the rope ties together . . . i guess they are called knots haha. Also, I want to give the tubing a little wipe down . . . they had warehouse dust and grim on them. I still have a few days before crit, so we'll see ;)

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

I'm such a square (cube)

Making a start at my collapsible monument. It's not quite turning out how I thought. It's very unstable. I want it to be floppy, but maybe if I added a cross beam or something?

Thursday, January 16, 2014

Like this!


Collapsible monument

I'm pretty jazzed about my sculpture project! I'm going to make a collapsible/mobile monument! I was thinking of making a series of cubes that fit into one another like a matroyshka but during class yesterday, we saw some slides of the previous year's projects and the cube idea was one of them. Seeing it realized made me think it was actually kind of lame, an easy response to the question. I was really amped on the idea of a non-permanent monument I and just needed to give it a form. After talking with some of my classmates and my prof (who had brought in some samples of things she had lying around the studio), my project is going to take the form of an obelisk like the Washington monument, except it will be floppy/flacid using a pipe and cord system like the structure illustrated here:
It's gonna be great! It's going to act more as a parody to the idea of the monument with it being flacid and limp and all (a totes jibe at the pissing contest that monuments tend to be). It's going to have to be large scale so I'm thinking of using some pvc tubing and parachute cord. Yes. I'm all for this one! :D

Monday, January 13, 2014

Monument to the Plinth

I was thinking about the nature of the assignment of creating a collapsible structure for _____. It calls for something temporary, mobile, adaptable. So what is the opposite of that? In sculpture? = the monument. A monument is supposed to be permanent, a reminder of an event or public figure, stationary, fixed meaning and specific to one area (symbolic).
It might be interesting to explore the idea of the monument: a permanent piece vs collapsible/mobile.
- a monument to what?
- a reoccurring event: war, falling in love, heartbreak, death of art and beauty
What is the thing that's most unmovable about the monument? The plinth (on which stand General XX or Professor YY or Darcy MacLarty, humanitarian Xtreem).
So my piece would be expressing the reusable/temporary nature of the idea of the monument.
It's like a celebration of the events and people that we hold sacred, which changes in times as we live and grow. People mean different things to us at different times in our lives.
I'd like to use an ephemeral material like cardboard to create a series of plinths that can stack on top of each other but then can be dismantled and fit inside each other like a matroyshka.
I like the idea of taking a traditional  form of remembering something/one specific (set in stone) but making it impermanent so that the memory is lost.

Thursday, January 9, 2014

Art 222: sculpture

Ah yes! It's the start of a new term at UVic. I'm taking a sculpture class again, this time with Megan Dickie, one of my favourite artists :) She did the Canada Council Logo as punching bag a few years ago.
Our first assignment is to create a collapsible (or modular) structure/form for________. I've been thinking about doing a piece using light since the end of last term so I'm going to make a piece about illuminating a space (but not tied to a specific space or size, hence the collapsible aspect of the assignment).
Some example of other artists using the idea of collapsible form are:
Marcel Duchamp
Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes

Brian Jungen, modular