Closing out 2011

I was just going through the blog and realized I never finished posting about sculpture. Sculpture has been my favorite class and is going to be my concentration/focus in school. I shared with you in a previous post my first two projects back in October. I can't believe I forgot to update you on my final 2 projects so I'm just going to give a quick over view of them before I start the second level of sculpture in about a week.

As mentioned in the previous post the 3rd project was about water. Our only guidelines was that we had to use water in some form or fashion. This project I had a lot of fun with and honestly didn't come up with a deep concept like I usually do. I enjoy making art that has a meaning and a purpose and so I usually work starting with a concept and building an idea around that. However, for this piece I wanted to just have fun with it so I started brainstorming. Literally. Storming.
In Clemson it tends to flood when it rains, everything turns to mush and the only appropriate shoes are rain boots. At the time of this project we had a view rainy days then a good dry spell. I am someone that tries to ignore the rain. If its not a torrential down pour I'm usually ok with just my jacket not even necessarily my rain jacket. I hate umbrellas I try my hardest to avoid them.

All that to say, I made my 3rd sculpture rain.

The video isn't very good quality so I've also added a view stills that a good friend took during my critique.

I'm not going to go in to how I made it but you can tell a little bit of the mechanics from the picture above.
This project was a lot of fun. I walked around campus with it on an abnormally warm and sunny day and got some pretty fabulous looks from people. Sadly, because of the poor quality of the video (and my lack of technology skills) I couldn't share the video with you, but I'll keep working on it. Lets just say I got lots of "I'm so confused" and double takes while walking.  (Another plus to this project was that my professor told me this was one of the best beginning sculptures he had ever seen!! I knew I was meant to be a sculptron!)

Our final project for the class was a very long process. We focused more on the process than on our concepts which was something very new for me. This last project was about architecture, we could take any thing to do with architecture and then cast it in bronze. I thought it would be cool to take textures from architecture and put it in a place that it isn't normally in.
I chose the texture of asphalt. And for the first part of the project we used wax to create a positive of our object. Obviously, asphalt is flat and wouldn't have made a terribly interesting casting so I poured hot wax on specific pieces of asphalt and then peeled it up and formed them in to different size balls. This process took the texture of the asphalt and gave me the negative. We then made containers to place our wax positives in and covered them with plaster. Once they were vented and covered we then burnt out the wax in a kiln so that we would then have the negative impression of our object. (In my case I had the positive texture of the asphalt).
After the kiln cooled we could start making our bronze! Yes, MAKING BRONZE!

We each purchased enough copper for our individual projects and then were assigned to different jobs on the day we were forging the bronze. We heated up the copper added a view pieces of a different metal and then were able to pour the molten bronze in to each plaster mold.

It is a tradition to have a "Disco" party on the day we start off the forgery so I wanted to share some of our festive decorations with you guys :) We also had great dance music blasting the entire day! I'm sure the architecture students didn't like us by that point.

My final product isn't nearly as exciting as the process making it was. I set up my copper asphalt in a place that people would be able to interact with them. I wanted them to feel, see, and play with the objects.

I pressed out some wet clay so that as you rolled the ball around it would leave an impression. This is what it looked like after my critique was over.

Alright, this wasn't much of a "quick over view" but I just love sculpture so much I didn't want to sell it short. 

In just under a week I get to start making sculpture AGAIN!!