Paper Mache figure due April 11th

I expect your solution to take up a similar space as a small person even if the components are massed together (many and small). Be as interpretive about the figure as you like. Think about how it might aesthetically reflect your artist statement and go alongside work you do in other mediums, so that it reflects you.

Cardboard maks a good armature medium, but wide masking tape will really be valuable weather working with wire or cardboard. Bring your own pair of pliers for bending wire and take them with you when you are not in the studio.

Paper mache paste can be as simple as wood glue and water, do some research on formulas.

Look to the links here for paper mache tips and techniques.


Rachel asked if she could get started before Monday... Of course... whatever you need to do to make the end of the semester wind down efficiently. You all should have some skill in armature making from Design 2 projects with wire and paper and gel medium, so by all means start anytime.

See you Monday. Have a productive weekend.

Narrative Project

NARRATIVE

You may want to watch the Art 21 episode featuring narrative art and the artists speaking about it, The link is to the right, at the top of the section marked "narrative"

For Monday,
1)Read the article about Tom Sachs located on LMS in the handout section. Write a paragraph (40 words or more) as a synopsis of what you read and comments. You may be positive or negative toward the work of Tom Sachs, but have an opinion and convince me you read the article.
2)"shop" for 5-12 items that have some personality or subject that when grouped together can form a story. These items can relate or not. Pick things that you find interesting in their own right. For instance, a toy horse and a silver spoon and a race car don't relate immediately, but if you play with them enough some story forms.
3)Play with the items by rearranging them and photographing them interacting with each other until some story forms. Move them around, put them in different environs to help you imagine what you would do with these objects to make a sculpture that has a narrative core.
4)Come up with a concept of what you would do to this group of objects to tell the story. Remember, you can alter the objects in any way, and use any supporting physical materials to build your sculpture.

Of importance to your grade on the Narrative project:

You should be prepared to "sell" this concept to the class. In other words, you should be able to convince us why your treatment of the objects and their presentation contributes to the narrative (or story). If you are in Portfolio or BA think about how you could use this project to supplement the works you are making for that class. Work in content that relates to your artist statement.

Craft is important.

You may want to watch the Art 21 episode featuring narrative art and the artists speaking about it, The link is to the right, at the top of the section marked "narrative"

Automata

Many students were out sick, but several came in unprepared to work and assumed they could use the class time to "shop for supplies" I do realize only so many students can work in the woodshop at one time, but drawing, planning, and research are all operations that can be done in class. If a student shows up on Monday with no supplies and no idea "how big the box is going to be" or "what my concept is" they will be counted absent.
Flagler policy is 5 absences are max-- excused or otherwise, On the 6th you will be withdrawn by the registrar. Leaving you with a grade of W or WF depending on the timing of the 6th absence.

See you Wednesday: some thoughts

Dividing the labor is a good way to get started.

Wide masking tape  or duck tape is good for joining cardboard. Also consider bringing a stapler, and hot glue sticks (the small ones)

Weaving cardboard can get you a strong yet flexible form.

To get strips (like ribbons). Paper on the roll can be cut down  to sections on the band saw and unwound to
give you ribbons.

A definition of sculpture for our time.Excerpt from the magazine Sculpture November1998 Vol.17 No. 9

by Donald Kuspit  

Sculpture, like art in general, has become an amorphous concept, ill-defined and perhaps undefinable—yet another case of art-as-epistemological-problem. Anything that occupies space, and doesn’t hang on a wall, is “sculpture” or “sculptural.” The days when, with the English critic Adrian Stokes, one could make a nice neat distinction between three-dimensional objects made by carving and those made by modeling are over. Now, any object that sprawls in space, has physical presence, and manages to hold its own against architecture is sculpture. And yet the root of sculpture since antiquity has been the body’s existence in space. To be emotionally credible, what we call sculpture must evoke or in some way engage the archaic presence of the body in space. It must suggest the primitive experience of being a body in space, and convey the vicissitudes of the body in time. It must suggest what it feels like to live one’s body and how one’s body lives its own space and the space in which
it moves.

Read full article here:
http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag98/german/sm-germn.shtml