Seminar
During this week’s seminar we practised grounding techniques to try and ground ourselves to the ‘now’. These included focusing our different senses. We ate crystalized ginger and sat thinking whilst touching soil.
We also crushed leaves that had a strong scent and practised some grounding mediation to get us in touch with our bodies and surroundings.
We spent some time writing on till receipt rolls about the work we have been doing for our projects, just jotting down our stream of consciousness as we thought for roughly five minutes. The result, for me, was a long list of words and phrases relating to the ongoing development of my clay dragon model that I have been working on, alongside the meaning and purpose behind it.
Experimentation and Art Production
I made further progress on my clay dragon model, first moulding the shape of the wings around the skeleton structure I finished last week. I spent some time smoothing the clay into a soft shape and moulding it into the rest of the model.
Due to the wings being a large part of the model and structurally important, I had to wait for them to partially set before adding any further detail to the model.
Once the wings had set enough after roughly 8 hours, I rolled thin strips of clay for the spine of the wings extruding from the spine of the body and carefully moulded them onto the model. I now needed to wait for the wings to fully set before adding detail to the head, which would involve lifting the dragon model.
Because I couldn’t make further progress on my dragon sculpture, I worked on a dragon drawing using black biro. I was initially sketching a version of the clay dragon and developed it into this finished piece.
While drawing this dragon I realised I wanted my clay model to also be in black and white, but with more solid contrast inspired by the black and white associated with time and clocks. I also realised through this that I didn’t want to add legs or arms to my dragon model as I wasn’t too keen on how they looked in this drawing. Once the drawing was finished I cut a smooth outline around it and pasted it onto black card for presentation.
Bibliography:
Louise Bourgeois: Moma (no date) The Museum of Modern Art. MOMA. Available at: https://www.moma.org/artists/710 (Accessed: February 22, 2023).
Tate (no date) The art of Louise Bourgeois, Tate. Tate. Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/louise-bourgeois-2351/art-louise-bourgeois (Accessed: February 22, 2023).