This week was extra chaotic. To be honest I don’t know how to control my own life anymore. It’s getting hard – I have work, my birthday was coming up, and then my birthday party. All this planning and trying to rest a little bit. I will share a conclusion that I came up with a long time ago – I hate resting when I am in the process (even the long-term one) of creating something for school. I try to rest, but when I do I think about the projects all the time. Im stressing out, because of it and in the end, I’m not resting at all. Additionally, the stress paralyzes me so I’m also not doing the work I’m supposed to. It’s an endless circle that I hate so much. And this is what’s happening recently. I know I have to do something, but it is terribly hard for me to get up and do it. But Im thinking about it, so the time for myself is worthless.
Okay, let’s stop complaining and write something else. I think I’ll put some research that I’ve done here and we will call it a week.
Stanisław Dróżdż
Klepsydra
Stanisław Dróżdż – artysta konceptualny, jeden z pionierów i najwybitniejszych przedstawicieli poezji konkretnej, organizator wielu wystaw i sesji naukowych.
Stanisław Dróżdż is a polish conceptual artist, considered one of the first and the most outstanding concrete poets. His works can be found all around Poland in Wrocław, Warsaw and Łódź, but also in the Museum of Contemporary Art w Los Angeles. One he said that “concrete poetry is about isolating, mutonomising the word. Isolating it from its linguistic context, isolating it also from the context of extra-linguistic reality, so that the word, as it were, means something in and for itself. In concrete poetry, form is determined by content and content by form. Traditional poetry describes the image. Concrete poetry writes with an image”. The hourglass is made of 3 words – było, jest,będzie (eng. was, is, will be), and the word jest is the smallest part of it. We focus too much on the events from the past and on what will happen in the future. We do not pay attention to now. And NOW is always with us. We don’t recognise it at the moment and that’s why we are losing it. We waste our time thinking about the past and future and I am aware that I am a person who does that. I always think about the future – it helps me to go through life – if I have something interesting happening in the future I feel better. But I also know that it’s not a good way of living – I forget that now is the most important part of my life. Now I can do things that will help me in the future I crave so badly.
Ron Mueck
Hyperrealistic sculptures
Ron Mueck is an Australian sculptor that lives and creates in the United Kingdom. In his young life, he worked with various types of art – while growing up it was a family business of puppetry and doll making, he also was a director in Australian children’s television. In the past, after moving to America he worked in the film and advertising department. His first sculpture that caught people’s attention was Dead Dad – a figure of his recently passed away father at half-scale made from memory and imagination. In his works, he often touches on subjects of experiences and emotions, such as birth, death, vulnerability, fear and compassion. He invites the audience to reflect on those emotions – not only theirs but also others. By using all the traditional elements of his medium – pose, gesture, facial expression, scale and realism his works elicit an immediate emotional response and create powerful psychological portraits of the human condition.
Johnson Tsang
Lucid Dreams
ohnson Tsang is an artist born in Hong Kong who mostly works with realist sculptural techniques accompanied by surrealist imagination. His art pieces are usually made of ceramics, but he also has worked on stainless steel sculptures. Johnson has developed his techniques of capturing instantaneous moments of splashes with white porcelain over the past decade. He devotes 50 to 60 hours per week to creating his illusionistic ceramic sculptures that range from being lyrically beautiful to thought-provokingly arresting. For him, sculpting is a way to communicate his observations of the world to the viewers. “His porcelain sculptures are about relationships: the relationships among things, between humans and the things around them, and between humans themselves. Ultimately, they are about love, even when on the surface the subject matter might not seem to evoke “love.” As Tsang sees it, even negative emotions such as fear are rooted in love. I admire the professionalism in the execution of his works. All the details, the smoothness of the face – it’s really hard to achieve. When I use plaster it looks absolutely different from this. His works show me that the materials that we use are very important to transfer our intentions and the meaning of our work to others.
Ruth Asawa
The faces
Ruth Asawa was a Japanese-American artist, educator, and arts advocate primarily active in San Francisco, California. She is famous for her sinuous wire sculptures that she started creating during her time at Black Mountain College, but today I focus on her other project that caught my attention. She created 233 masks of human faces of people she met -faces of friends, students, family members, and community members. The project originally hung on the exterior of Ruth Asawa’s family home in Noe Valley and has never been shown to the public before. After two years of planning the artist took part in the long-term installation to show her face to the world. Through the making of masks, she developed a long-standing relationship with clay. “To make the masks, she would first apply petroleum jelly to a sitter’s face to prevent adhesion. She then applied plaster in layers, taking special care around the eyes, nose, and hairline. After allowing it to set for around five minutes, Asawa carefully removed the mould and let it harden. Using this plaster mould, she created a clay positive that was then fired, thus completing the mask-making process.” https://museum.stanford.edu/exhibitions/faces-ruth-asawa#Making. I find this amazing how she decided to capture those people and make a memorial of them. It reminds my project a lot and I cannot stop appreciating the faces of Asawa. The number of them is great and the variety of human features that we can see is gorgeous.
Antony Gormley
Field
Antony Gormley is a British sculptor that utilizes the human form to explore man’s existence and relationship to his environment. The Field installation was created in collaboration with communities from around the world. About sixty men, women and children of various ages took part in creating thirty-six thousand figures. “Participants were asked to follow only a few instructions: the pieces were to be hand-sized and easy to hold, eyes were to be deep and closed and the head was to be in proportion with the body. Figures range in size from 8–26 centimetres tall and were dried in the sun and then baked in a brick kiln. The twenty-five tonnes of clay used in making the figures came from the valley floor a few miles to the south-west of San Matias.” https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/antony-gormley-field we can also read here that “Field acts as an ‘invasion’ or ‘infection’, and the sensation is that of a tide; an endless mass that has become temporarily limited by the architecture of the place where it is installed, but could easily extend further than we can see. When we look at the figures in Field, they return our gaze, which has the effect of making us, and not them, the subject of the work.”