Capital letters! Poo jokes! Quotes!

Oh, hello there. Long time, no see!

Well, you see, I'm doing this little thing here in my final spring semester of university called ARTS 486, also-known-as the GRADUATING PROJECT. This means that over the course of the semester, we have to complete five projects in a direction of our choosing, and have works ready to be mounted in the downtown Nanaimo Art Gallery for the graduating show, Explorations, in March. March! March. So soon. Breathe...

So, I've proposed to continue the explorations that I started last semester in my ceramics directed study with Scott. I want to continue exploring the mixture of media, including some painting, and trying out some gel medium transfers of some of my photographs from the fall, which I want to apply back onto clay slabs. Full circle!

I'm also hoping to go to more life drawing classes (sadly, last week's was cancelled due to the snow day), but I want to try my hand at a lovely red clay body that I got in Victoria, known as Klamath Yellow. Why is "yellow" in the name if it's a red clay, you ask? Well, as the man at the clay store aptly put it, when it's wet, the clay is a lovely "baby-poo yellow." Once fired, it turns into a beautiful red. The benefits of this? Well gosh, who doesn't like making things change colour (read: magic) WITH INTENSE AMOUNTS OF HEAT? And poo jokes.

Unfortunately, I don't really have much started that I can share with you all, visually speaking, but for a written project this week, we had to look up some art vocabulary in reviews or artist statements. This led me to discover the art magazines in the Periodical section of the library, where I have decided I should spend some more time this semester. It was there, this morning, that I stumbled upon this lovely little quote about sculpture, which I find relevant to my work.

“Sculpture is the silent key to the world we encounter every second of every day. You might say that sculpture is what is not painting or printmaking or performance or video, what is not photography or film or cyberspace. You might be right. But you may just as easily be wrong.”

 – Ian Carr-Harris, professor at OCAD University

More to come, and thanks for reading! 

Art-dentity Crisis!

Last week, I was faced with a bit of an art-dentity crisis. I had a Directed Study meeting with Scott on Friday, so I set up my new pieces from Wednesday night's life drawing class to show him.

I hadn't been very inspired on Wednesday night. I'd been tired and easily distracted, and found it hard to focus on the pieces I was working on. A number of times they were incomplete because I thought the poses were going to be longer than they ended up being. Based on these things, I didn't have very much to say.

I think that my exasperation was evident, and so Scott did what he does best: he asked all the hard questions. He doesn't necessarily expect answers to them all, but still he asks to get you thinking. Not only thinking, but getting your brain reeling. I'm sure if he wanted to, he could make you question your own identity ten times over. Now, he was making me question my art-dentity.

He asked: What are you trying to achieve? Where do you go from here?

I thought I had come up with a beginning of an answer last week to at least one of these questions, but I was slowly coming to the realization that I had been researching ideas that were actually moving me further and further away from the point of what I'd started. The idea of working with the clay in a temporal and fleeting way was my focus, and if I were to move the pieces beyond that, through drying and glazing, I would lose all of the intended value of the initial process.

He asked: How are these relevant? What does it mean for these to be made by Melanie?

I'm in my fourth year of visual arts, and this is the first time I've been confronted with these kinds of questions. Next semester, I'm supposed to compile my graduating project, a comprehensive body of work that will be hung in the Nanaimo Art Gallery along with several other students' work. I'm wondering, why hasn't the issue of personal direction, beyond the mere satisfaction of project requirements, been acknowledged more before now? And because I've never really thought to ask myself these things... who am I as an artist, anyway?


So I did a bit of musing on this subject. How do I do art?

- I often find myself feeling creatively inspired, but I'm not always able to translate the feeling/the moment into something tangible. It's usually that an inner need to satisfy the moment gets fulfilled.

- I'm not a very big planner. I don't draw hundreds of sketches before starting something. Often, it's just one sketch, or just starting with just an an idea in my head.

- I enjoy photography when it's spontaneous, like travel photography. I enjoy using natural light, and am usually a little intimidated by studio lighting. Too technical!

- I like using my hands! I like for the medium to be tangible, and to feel close to what I'm doing.

So there seems to be this theme of spontaneity, the temporal, and working with my hands. But I've also come to the realization that working with one thing for too long allows me the chance to lose momentum.

Well, I got a second wind last night by moving into another medium: photography. Though I've already taken pictures of most of my pieces, I approached them again with more attention than mere documentation. I set up a little miniature studio with two small desk lamps and a black scarf as a backdrop. The idea was to capture the pieces in their wet state so that they retain the details from their creation, the temporal and spontaneous environment in which they were made. In this way, I hope to enhance as well as emphasize their value in this state.

These photos are just initial studies, and I hope to go into some more depth with this exploration. I would also like to do some drawings of the figures, or do drawings from the photographs, and perhaps then photograph those drawings... experimenting with the ways each medium can lend to the other.

I still don't know exactly where I'm going, but I'm gradually figuring out the how and the why in order to create more purpose within my work, so that I can take ownership of what I'm doing. Which means, more questions, more musings, and more self-exploration.

Mapping Ideas.

Picture this: it's Monday night. I'm sitting on my bed, my back propped up with pillows against the wall, and my computer warming my lap. Under the laptop, a fleecy blanket covers my lower half. Under the blanket, I wear leggings, and big woolly socks pulled up to my knees. I'm wearing a floral dress of one pattern, and my warmest knit sweater of a completely different (un-matching) floral pattern overtop. On my head, I wear a stripy winter headband.

My house is cold.

But it's within these conditions that I start to do some research. I need to take the next step with my life sculpting, but I'm not quite sure where to start. I know I want to go to life drawing classes, and I know I want to focus on producing a lot of figures quickly. Beyond that, I don't have much of a style or concept figured out to push it any further.

Time to hunt for ideas.

I start by looking through a couple ceramics/sculpture books from the library. Since I'd already bookmarked a couple things of interest, I look at them again. But I find ideas aren't springing up from that, so I decide to look up a couple of the artists online. 

From there, I move on to looking at some videos on Ceramic Arts Daily. I come across this one of artist Gerit Grimm.

Her style is very fun and whimsical, which is very much unlike my own, but something I admire. It gets me thinking about Sara and Stephanie and all those lovely Gabriola girls, who are wonderful artists with very cool styles that I love. Stephanie takes ceramics classes with Mariko on Gabriola and raves about her work, so I take a look at her website.

http://www.feedlotstudios.ca/

It's the colour and the whimsy and the detailing that draws me in, again things I don't use much in my own work. I drink it in. Mariko then directs me to Black Bird Studios, and artist Paige Kearns-Coull, who has a similar style.

http://blackbirdstudios.squarespace.com/

And then I'm wanting to use these things somehow to inspire my own work. But how can I interpret these things to make them my own? What exactly about them would fulfill what I'm looking for? How would I add different elements to my life sculpting?

Earlier, I came across these Linda Ganstrom pieces, which seem to answer that last question to an extent.

http://www.lindaganstrom.com/smallworksgallery.html

Her nudes sit atop structures or objects, the two elements working together beautifully. They're a little darker than the previous fanciful photos I was looking at, but in a way I can relate to them more. They still incorporate lovely colouring and detail through the texture of the clay itself as well as the glazing methods. They intrigue me.

So I brainstorm some more, and one thing that I remember includes the very inspiration for the title of my blog: a poem I wrote in second year (2009) about the process of working with clay.

My brain is now stewing with many more ideas about what I might like to pursue, but I won't spill the beans about them all tonight. 

For now, I'll leave you with the poem, "Creation." It is meant to be read in three ways: the left column alone, the right column alone, and the two columns combined, line by line. This was based on the structure of a poem we read in class, and very difficult to achieve. It's not perfect, but I really enjoyed working with it, and was happy with the final product. Enjoy!

Creation

Bring up the                                                                                                lie with

layers of damp dirt                                                              grass at your back while

in your agile hands                                                                         you hold the sky

the soft grays                                                                                      falling slowly

under your spell                                                                       with no interruptions

time aligns                                                                                 like birds on a wire

the spiral                                                                                                you invent

like a deck of cards                                                                                     to form

locking molecules                                                stars of constellations in your mind

with strength                                                   to reinforce something that isn’t there

to fall into step                                                                          like my convictions

as the wheel turns                                                                  about illusion and how

wet and waiting                                                                               the world winds

half                                                                                                               truths

into shape                                                                                         out of neurons

dent and fold                                                                                               to form

the wet and wanting                                                                                   thoughts

earthly                                                                                                            ideas

upward                                                                                         simple silhouettes

creation                                                                                                   in my eye

Neverending Wednesday

Last Wednesday was the first Life Drawing drop-in session! It made for a long day though, working at 7:45am, class at 4pm, then life drawing from 6-9pm. I was deeeefinitely a little pooped.

But here's what I got up to.

2-minute poses

2- and 5-minute poses

5-minute pose  

20-minute pose

30-minute pose

With the short poses, I started off using my hands as well as one of my clay tools. For the longer poses I decided to use my hands only. This limited the amount of detail I was able to create, but I found the mark-making and texture to be much more interesting.

I decided to play around with omitting parts of the body. This started with the omission of the heads, mostly because they are too heavy to deal with while the clay is in a wet stage, but also because of the amount of detail needed to make a good face. Mine end up looking cartoony in this format. So I played around with ways to resolve the issue by including only parts of the head and face to see how it would turn out. 

The jury's still out on that one, but hopefully with more life drawing sessions and experimentation, I will turn out something that I would like to pursue further. :)

Agile hands.

Last week I alluded to something that I'm working on that involves life drawing. I'm doing a ceramics directed study this semester, which is a course in which I create my own projects and goals under the supervision of a prof, who in my case is Scott Leaf. Last year, I'd attempted a ceramics directed study, but the topic I'd chosen to focus on lost its value to me and I was struggling with the amount of independence needed to accomplish things.

More than halfway through the semester, Scott had a very serious sit-down with me to talk about refocussing. He asked what I was passionate about, and the one thing I could think of was the drawing class I was taking. So we talked and I started thinking about how I could incorporate drawing into my ceramics studies. I decided to prepare clay and take it with me to life drawing.

These are only a few examples of what I came out with that night. From 30 second poses, to 5 minutes, to half an hour, I used up all the time creating as much as I could, and I had discovered something great. I loved it!

Three days later, the teachers went on strike. After a month of my pieces being wrapped up as tightly as they could be, locked away in the art building, we were finally back to classes. I ended up dropping the course for a refund so that I could retake it in the fall and have an entire semester to focus on this new topic, to get as much out of it as I could. 

Since life drawing hasn't started yet, I've started a study on hands. These are all life-sized, if not slightly larger, some modeled from my own hand, some from other people.

Weeee!