This week I made a few more ceramic pieces and continued with my paper sculptures. These still both feel very much like (not to be cliched) planting seeds that are yet to bloom; the ceramics have yet to be fired and I still don’t feel I’ve made anything particularly successful in terms of the paper sculptures. I thought paper would be a quicker sculptural medium but actually, in terms of the physical making process, it’s quite slow and finicky. Clay is much more immediate and fluid to work with, it just has the wider wait-time of the drying and firing.
I feel there are two things I am interested in exploring with the paper sculptures that I thought I might be able to resolve together, but actually may be working against one another. On the one hand I thought I could make much larger (delicate but shonky) sculptures than other media I have worked with – perhaps even allowing me to make more immersive sculptural environments if pushed further. These sculptures, in my head, are somewhat 3D versions of my drawings – strange, unplaceable, growing forms. On the other hand, there’s the nice effect of the double sided/layered drawings that change as the light passes through them. I had thought I’d be able to incorporate this effect into my sculptures but, thinking more logistically about it, this requires paper to be pressed flat against one another in order for the light to pass through and retain the detail of the drawings below. Perhaps it would be worth me concentrating more on this side of things – creating multiple drawings and then physically making these into the sculptures, rather than more speculatively just sculpting paper into (hopefully) an effective overall form. Could push this to a larger scale too?
(Another logistical note with the paper sculptures: taping pieces together is often a little restrictive, so perhaps try glue-gunning together? Might be an interesting conflation of materials?)
In terms of the clay pieces, as mentioned I made a few more this week including some where I tried to be less controlling of the clay. With the previous pieces I had been delicately rolling and placing various elements (to some extent necessary when considering how e.g. glass will melt), whereas with these ones I worked more with ripping segments more randomly and attaching, creating a wild, less controlled seaweed-like growth (see below). The structure was not at all structurally sound, but this leaves more space for material agency – a movement beyond my control. I looked at the work of Luke Fuller this week, and he seems to use cardboard moulds in his work which then burns away in the kiln – something that could be interesting to explore? I’ll try and remember to ask Karl about this.
This past week was quite interrupted (in the sense that I had a lot on such as Cultivator, Tate Emerging Artist Platform and being away from Falmouth Fri-Mon), and looking ahead this next week seems just as, if not more, busy. I’ve been able to do a fair amount of artist research, and have read a little of Doreen Massey’s For Space, this week while away, but I think my priority this next week just needs to be making whenever I can (although I also would like to research the work of Alice Fox more closely). This will take the form of: taking my sculptures to be fired (and hopefully collecting them too?), working on (larger?) paper drawings and then assembling these somehow into sculptures/just multi-layered drawings, and also potentially some casting.
Anna Harris 