ARTS280 - Intro to Sculpture
This assignment is meant to familiarize students with planar construction and the various ways cardboard can create form, texture, volume, and structure. Each student was simply asked to create a mask that was at least 36” in one dimension, had at least three distinct ‘textures’, and displayed some aspect of their identity, history, or interests. The emphasis on this project was on ambitious work and problem-solving.
ARTS280 Online - Intro to Sculpture
The fall of the 2020 presented a great deal of challenges for students and teachers. Our lack of physical proximity and access to facilities made the challenge of introducing students to sculpture unique and particularly difficult. This forced me, as an instructor, to rethink the boundaries of sculptural form. By looking to Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures, we explored the possibilities of form and how absurdity could serve as an intervention into the banality we all felt while being cooped up in our homes.
ARTS280 Online - Intro to Sculpture
This project is titled Unheimlich or Uncanny.
“Generally understood to denote a feeling of unease and uncomfortableness, the German word unheimlich is associated with negative emotions such as dread, fear and terror. ... The first is that the core of the word lies in the noun 'das Heim', meaning 'home'.”
For this assignment, students were asked to use spray foam, wool, paint, and any other media they chose to make a non-representional form. I wanted to introduce a way of making that felt uncontrollable and forced students to contend with a medium that ultimately did what it wanted to do (great stuff foam insulation). The wool was then needle felted or adhered in any way that felt appropriate while producing an odd, grotesque, but satisfying form.
ART104 - Sculputre for Non-Majors
The project is titled ‘Genuine Counterfeit’. We began by looking at work from artists like Conrad Bakker, Stephanie Syjuco, and Tom Sachs.
For this project I asked my students to carve a block of pink foam, using hand and rotary tools in order to reproduce an object they could not purchase or obtain. The object had to be unobtainable either because of lack of access to mass sums of money or because it was just simply not for sale or unavailable. In addition to researching the above artists and how their objects speak to markets of exchange, we also read the introduction to Sherry Turkle’s book Evocative Objects. During critique each student told us a story that helped us understand the impetus behind the creation of their objects.
Links used as a conceptual guide:
Conrad Bakker:
https://anythingyouwantarchive.tumblr.com/
Stephanie Syjuco:
Tom Sachs:
ARTS280 - Intro to Sculpture
For this project, students were asked to form groups and produce large-scale inflatable sculptures. Each group determined the form they wanted to achieve and were given as much plastic and packing tape as needed. Upon completion, each sculpture was inflated with either a leaf blower or shop vac.
