Week 6,7 and 8

Week 6 26.07.2023

This week I moved to Portsmouth to live with my sister for the week. I only brought my Ipad with me as a limited resource to work with and started to experiment with procreate, which is a similar program to photoshop. I also continued my walks, I think that moving to a new area temporarily stops my natural momentum, so it was difficult for me to engage fully in this project this week.

My iPad experiments lead to creating a gif, its a very simple animation of a hand coming from nowhere and reaching for the yellow yolk, which turns into a spiral before being stolen.

Week 7 2.08.2023

After reading Mirandas comments under my last post I have decided to commit to the bin bags sculptures. Experimenting with the material and all its potential. This week has also been particularly busy as I have moved back to Aber.

THE SCULPTURE BEGINS:

For the sculptures I wanted to limit myself to only found objects. I was really thinking about the idea of consumption, something that everyone struggles with in todays world as we have so many resources available to us at the touch of a finger or i should say at the swipe of a card. A repeated question I kept thinking was do we need more stuff, an ode to Dees project earlier I am sure. The answer is always no, so for the sculptures I have limited myself to what I have available to me which was a roll of white bin bags and a roll of ribbon. I also then added duct tape as a way to adhere the sculptures onto the wall.

The sculptures are to start 2D. The shapes are organic and the bin bags become these botanical objects. I found the shadows casted on the wall particularly interesting as they became human like. I really like this detail, the idea that we cant escape our own creation, the human is behind all objects made and the shadow is always present.

I decided to then add more objects to the sculpture, further manipulating its form. I don’t want to create more and more sculptures but rather add to and subtract from the one I already have, photographing the different outcomes which then creates the series.

The bag of free materials:

Finished 2D sculpture.

In the end I was to able to make the 2D sculpture into a very human like form. I did change the contrast and sharpness of the original image in order for the details to stand out clearly. I really think that digital media is a very useful tool to manipulate multiple outcomes out of one singular image.

ARTIST RESEARCH:

Franz West

Franz West was an Austrian artist who is best known for his unconventional objects and sculptures as well as his installations and interactive furniture work. His sculptures where made of papier mache and plaster which manipulated in various shapes and sizes to create his bright and fun sculptures. An aspect that I find particularly interesting about Franz’s work is how the public could interact with the sculptures leading to both playful as well as awkward interactions. I think that the audiences is sometimes seen as non trust worthy in relation to the artists work so to see interactions was really exciting to me. I also find is sculptures inspiring as they lean to abstraction, leaving the spaces for the audience to create there own relationship with the sculptures.

Gavin Turks:

TRASH

Edition of 8
Painted bronze
42 x 47 x 51 cms
2007A bronze cast of a full black bin bag, painted to look real.

‘A bag full of discarded products, unrecycled organic matter thrown in with the by-products of our wasteful consumerist lifestyles. This rubbish is encapsulated in the formal roundness of this classic trompe l’œuil artwork. We are defined by what we throw away and conversely we are deconstructed by what we choose to display in our hallowed museum halls.’

I enjoy the simplicity of the sculptures here, there is no argument that what we are looking at is in fact a pile of trash or I should write, just the single one we can see in the image above. As Turks describes in the quote above the trash is a literal translation of what we discarded in this society of mass consumption. As we are spoilt with choice and anything that may not please us is thrown away, not just stuff that is without use to us anymore either, such as the scraps of rotting food. But potentially useful things, things that aren’t wasting away with time but have just been declared as useless. On a more literal level the trash bag is an object that we see in a day to day bases, something that we have become accustomed to. Through Turks sculptures he has brought in something that is conventionally seen as an non artistic thing and has put it into the art world. Which reminds me of Duchamp’s Urinal. I think that the trash ultimately completes it goal which is to stop and shock the audience and make them wonder why and how trash has ended up in their art space as a slap to the face of the consequences of our over -consumption.

Simon Pericich

‘All Together Now’

Pericich bin bags sculptures come from his dystopic vision of the future. Something that he describes as the ‘hilariously doomed nature of humanity’ The sculptures themselves are large scale ominous things which as a result of their organic form make them feel cloud like. Which is a small contradiction of the material used which by nature is stiff unlike the airiness of clouds.

For me these artist have made me want to make my sculptures 3D, I want to continue to work with the method of binding the binbags together with string but I have yet to see how i can make them into a 3D free-standing form which are the requirements I have put on the outcomes.

Week 8 09.08.2023

This week I started my exploration into 3D sculpture, I realised that the bin bags are naturally easy to make 3D as you can fill them with air and tie the top off like a balloon. This made me briefly experiment with how I could make the bags fit onto the human form and manipulate our organic lines.

This lead me to my line of thinking about how microplastics are literally in everything that we consume. As a result we have microplastics in us. From this I could imagine an more extreme scenario where the plastic binds to us more visibly as it has done already in cases such as plastic rocks.

Through my exploration I was able to make my first successful 3D sculpture.

I like the idea of putting the sculptures into settings. This way it almost makes the image look like a painting as it gives the sculptures narrative.

A return to Ida Applebroug:

Something that I really enjoyed about Applebroogs work is her playful nature with her extensive media, I particularly really enjoy her digital outcomes. One thing I want to do with my work is create as little excessive waste as possible. Only using the materials I already have to continue different outcomes. Using digital media gives me the opportunity to create multiple different outcomes with just one original source.