September 16, 2020

Cross contour drawings of a piece of driftwood.

I chose a piece I already had collected instead of using the one provided to us. I did this because I feel connected to the piece I had collected; after all, I wouldn’t have brought it home if it didn’t speak to me in some way.

My first impressions: I’m excited at the physical engagement required of the assignment: large pieces of paper; kneeling/sitting on the floor to work; the upcoming translation of 2D representations of a 3D object into a 3D wire representation. How does that work? Will I, as I work with the 6 views, become more intimate with the object and its contours, and will those contours start to “speak” to me, the way contour speaks to me when I am beach walking, forest walking, just living life?

This post is really just a test post, to get me going. See if I can figure out how to insert the photographs I took of the first four cross contours. More to come.

September 21, 2020

6 contour drawings of a piece of driftwood. This is the “more to come” part that I refer to above. (With thanks to Suzi Quatro for providing the soundtrack of this morning’s efforts.)

September 22, 2020

After class today, and after reflecting on Angela’s comments about peoples’ wire sculptures, I returned to my piece and decided to try what occurred to Angela as we were going through the presentations: to work on one aspect at a time, and then add them all together.

I finished the second aspect, and as I was finishing, felt dissatisfied with the integrity of the piece, as it flopped all over the place and the two completed aspects at times became indistinguishable.

I made a spiral for the base of the longer piece that points out from the main body of the piece; to do this, I hammered a nail into the centre of a block of wood, and using a pair of bent-nose pliers to stabilize the wire against the nail, wrapped the wire five or six times around the nail. I was dissatisfied with the lack of perfection in the coil but attached it to the base of the protruding side piece, as seen in my diagrams.

At that point, I became impatient with the floppiness of the piece, so photographed it on the surface of my work table and then suspended it from the bottom of a light fixture in my studio. Once it was suspended, I immediately “liked” it better, and began to photograph it from a variety of angles, then took a short video.

The video especially provided me with new information about the piece; it appears to be transforming into a powerful figure, perhaps holding some sort of weapon, or phallus. But that perception is in part due to the angle of the photographs (I hope). I will likely have to work hard to resist enhancing that emerging figure as I work on the next two angles. I have not been able to upload the .mov file from my phone to this platform.

September 26, 2020

Wire Sculpture cont’d

Another couple of hours with the wire, Prince playing (thank you Apple Music), and I think I’ve progressed a bit, especially when I look back at the photographs I took a few days ago. I’ve refined my spiral-making technique, and my wire-twisting technique has also improved. I’m impatient with this piece, and I want to move on to something bigger, and figurative, something public. The ideas come with each new twist, and each twist leads to me adjusting the sculpture with my hands. I’m not finished yet, but just in case I don’t get back to this piece before Tuesday morning’s class, here is the piece so far.

September 28, 2020

Feels and looks like a student project; however, as I progressed through the stages, I learned about the properties of the wire and what I could do and not do with it. I concluded the piece by adding two twisted-wire words in the centre: warmth and comfort. I feel as if the piece is finished. Regardless, it’s time to move on to the skeleton sketches!