My work from the group exhibition!
My idea for this work, and how I’ll work in the future was to face my own self doubts about my art, the inner critic that always tells me what I’m doing is wrong, or isn’t good enough. I tried to work with the self doubt, giving it a form in the real world to get it out of my head. It was hard to begin with, I felt like I wanted to cry several times because the doubt had taken over - “what I’m creating is rubbish! This isn’t art!”.
It’s interesting how I felt while creating these little sculptures, maybe next time I’ll write down the internal thoughts alongside it, it’s like a battle against myself sometimes. It was quite meditative as well, once I began to accept the doubt as part of creating these sculptures, and all of my art, I felt more at peace, and was just able to create. I don’t want to overcome the doubt, I want to accept it and work with it; it’d be impossible to overcome it and would probably end disastrously! Somebody described these sculptures as being “little gremlins”, I think that’s exactly what they are; those little niggling voices in your head.
Somebody might just look at these and see unskilled sculpture, lumps of clay and think it’s all outlandish; but for me it wasn’t about skillful sculpting or realism, it’s about showing hesitation and doubt.
Two quick drawings from memory in my sketchbook. These are actually of a few of the sculptures I created for my exhibition, which I will get photographs of soon on to here! Just waiting for them to be sent to me, although I did get a few on my digital camera but I know the images won’t be anywhere near as good a quality.
So could these be considered a preview?
A quick drawing from my sketchbook from one of Karl Blossfeldt’s photographs. Now that it’s on the screen I can see where I went wrong, but I’m trying to improve my cross hatching skills as well which isn’t so bad in this. The scanner has made the image a little grainy, even on the high PPI setting, sorry!
Another series of blind drawings, but with these I decided to use brown packaging paper. I really like the quality of the brown paper against the black pens. I also had a ‘happy accident’, as in the last drawing I used a gold marker to create a second drawing over the first, however I didn’t realise you couldn’t see the drawing until after I took the blindfold off. I moved away from it, the light hit it and it was revealed! I hope you can see it in the photograph? Sorry for the bad quality, phone camera…
A preview of my exhibition work. I need to make so many more sculptures for Thursday! I’ve used about 3/4 of a 12.5kg block of clay, and I aim to uee the rest of it hy Thursday. A lot of work ahead, as well as helping everyone else to set up the exhibition.
A series of blind drawings I created. I chose to use a thick black marker for these, so they’d stand out against the white cartridge paper, and so it was permanent. The first two I created one after the other, imagining forms in my mind and trying to ‘draw them out’.
The larger drawing was created a little while after, I decided to upscale the paper size, I’d guess it’s about 1.5m by 1.7m, and it’s interesting to see what I thought I was drawing and what I actually did were completely different. There are some interesting areas in the piece though, such as in the last two images, even if it doesn’t work as a whole drawing!
I don’t ever remember posting these? I guess I should put them here now, I haven’t posted any of my own work since December last year! I actually created these pieces a while ago now, back in September when I started the first semester. I used graphite, ink, watercolours, chalk and markers to create these pieces.
(Source: senticous)
Here are some more sketches from the same sketchbook as my previous art post, which I created when I stared to develop my ideas. The shapes in my sketches reminded me a lot of coral, so I started looking at the natural forms of coral and trying to abstract them in some way in my work, so I wasn’t drawing a representation of coral, but something reminiscent of it.
(Source: senticous)
These are four sketches I picked out from my sketchbook, which are loose studies from a stone sphere, observing the surface of the mineral. I applied metallic and blue acrylic paints onto the page with a printing roller, and painted on top with coloured inks. I like how in some areas the paint absorbs the ink, but in others the ink contrasts against the paint. I used A4 Kraft paper, metallic and cerulean blue acrylic paint, drawing ink.
(Source: senticous)
My second series of hybrid fungi sculptures, shot on site with a Nikon D-90 and a 60mm macro lens.
(Source: senticous)
Here’s a rare photograph of myself, looking very happy. It was taken by a friend who was documenting the process of me creating my blind sculpture. This mainly serves the purpose of showing you the end result! I’ll possibly upload proper photographs of it soon.
My second series of hybrid fungi sculptures, shot on site with a Nikon D-90 and a 60mm macro lens.
(Source: senticous)
