Sculpture Project - 'Juxtapositions'

Shot of early drawing and brainstorm notes - my original concept was to create a wire ribcage.

Pencil drawing of later concept - I decided I wanted to juxtapose papier mache with wire and create a hollow torso for my vessel.

Early Inspiration Drawing:

A pencil, biro and acrylic paint sketch I created that later inspired my sculpture concept.

I wanted to feature the female form and explore the theme of something that is hidden, which led to my decision of creating a torso and housing the vessel within the hollow chest.

The photographs below show the actual sculpture near to its completed stage, and it's apparent that my materials and my concept have altered during the process of creating the sculpture. I began by lubricating a female mannequin with vaseline and then using papier mache to create a shell over the top of this, the vaseline acting as a barrier so the cast would not stick to the mannequin. I originally intended to layer up papier mache repeatedly until the sculpture was solid enough to support itself, but then a classmate offered me a large amount of air-drying clay, so I decided to create an armature instead, wanting to experiment with materials. I applied the clay but overnight the front half of the cast had cracked considerably, with big fissures making the structure very weak. After some research, I discovered that this happened because when air-drying clay becomes hard, it contracts and if the clay dries too fast or too unevenly, it makes plateaus that essentially just pull away from one another, making cracks. So I made some slip and took more clay to fill these in, then completed the clay structure and wrapped it in cling film overnight. During this time, I began to think more about what my piece represented and how the cracks would come into this concept - I was thinking of dealing with human fragility, and so it made me think of Kintsugi, the Japanese art of filling cracks in pottery with gold. It is a celebration of fragility, and the more something has been broken, the more valuable and beautiful it is considered. The photos below show the sculpture once I had taken it off in two halves from the mannequin and glued the them together with a glue gun.

I used thin strips of foil to create a kintsugi effect over the real cracks in the clay, all stemming from the hole where I fill place the glass vessel.

On the back of the piece, I described what I was aiming to hint towards with the cracks, so that anyone observing the sculpture will be able to research what I had intended. I wanted some kind of explicit hint to kintsugi to prevent the piece from seeming too obscure.

The above two photographs depict the finished piece, with its interior completed and the paper moths added. I used pages of my own writing to represent the inner monologue, the private narrative, that composes a person's life - I had always wanted to use words for the interior of the torso, as I feel that words and emotion compose the inner life of a person. I knew I would not be creating a piece that just put two juxtaposing materials together. Narrative is central to the work I love, and also to what I create. The glass vessel represents the human heart, and I've used string to suspend it in the air within the torso. Both the outer shell and inner vessel are fragile and liable to break, and this is true of the human body and heart. Likewise, the moths floating above the open throat were inspired by some free-writing I did for a poem, and moths were a recurring image in what I wrote. As a personal symbol, they represent desires and goals. Moths always have a destination, a will to find light, and so I wanted to have them suspended above the light-bulbs to represent the desire that keeps human beings alive even though they are fragile. I've juxtaposed the interior and exterior, the hidden and the revealed, the transparent and the opaque, but my main focus is the juxtaposition between aspirations and reality.