Prelude to Spring

I was hoping that a blog would spur productivity, but instead I have found that I am just as adept at procrastination of a blog post as anything else. Currently, my sculpture class has been keeping me on the move. The class has been an onslaught of different materials, so although my mind has had to bend around different construction dilemmas, I haven't made much that I really like.

A project I finished a couple of weeks ago was the "Waiting for Forsythia" kinetic sculpture. These are hanging to the side of the front entrance to the art building. I spent most of the time trying to develop stands to hold them, and when this failed I had to hope that I could devise a way to hang them. As you can see from the picture, the hanging part was a success. And using fishing lure "barrel swivels," the pieces twirl very nicely with the slightest breeze. Now I only wish I had had more time to work on the forms.


The kinetic sculptures are irrigation piping covered in colorful duct tape. I had thought initially only in terms of circles--specifically the circles within circles. It was the night before the day of installation that I thought to try other configurations. And it was only by accident that a circle collapsed and turned into a wonderful leaf form. So there is much more potential to these materials than I was able to fully exploit. Ah well.

For our last project we were to take an object and negate its function by covering it with "tiling." Originally, the teacher had conceived of the project in terms of ceramic mosaics, but opened up the covering to anything. For my piece, I took a dead printer and covered it with pine cones and bark and planted a tree to grow out of it. So for the last couple of weeks I have been fighting a glue gun as I stuck pine cones and bark to hard plastic. I took it to class on Thursday thoroughly disgusted with it and miserable from the experience. All of the "sculptures" were put on display in the front display area of the art building, so I'll see what I think about it when I see it all again on Monday.