Author: Natalia

Jon Duff

Duff is a painter and sculpture based in Brooklyn, New York. What interested me about Duff’s work was how he assembled things of different textures. There’s substance, natural materials, leaves, trigs, rocks and plastic/ porcelain. I really enjoy his work, Meeting Cup, the resin is dripping and smothers the assemblage- something I would like to use in my work. Although his leaves and plants look to be made of plastic, I would like to natural resources in my work.

Elliott Hundley

Hundley is an artist based in Los Angeles. His works are inspired by Geek tragedy and classic mythology.

In his work he uses materials like gold leaf, shredded tapestries, metal wires, pine cones, and lobster legs, to create symbolic sculptures of Greek tragedies such as Dionysus, the god of fruitfulness and wine, avenging his mother, Semele.

I really love Hundley’s work because he assembles natural materials that work really well together, like how he ties wire and string together so it looks so elegantly, along with having moments where they stick out as if they’re reaching out.

For my assemblages, I want to use natural materials, experiment with different ways of tying things together and finding ways to contrast materials (eg. Sharp/soft)

Bibliography

John Duff, https://www.jonduff.com/sculpture

https://www.artforum.com/picks/elliott-hundley-28486

Art Review: Is Elliott Hundley’s Work More Suited For A Tim Burton Film Than the Nasher?

Gathering my materials, I put them all together by tying them and sticking them together in dirt. I really liked how the shells were tied together with flax, so I wanted to do this again.

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I really enjoy how the shells are together, so I tried isolating them. Creating a smaller work using a shell, another having them suspended in the air and then a shell assemblage similar to the plate.

I thought it would be a good idea to put different things inside of the shells, so I expanded on this idea. I put flowers inside of the shells hole- I find it really fascinating how the hard curves of the shells contrasts the spikey petals of the flowers.

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Enjoying how the flowers looked inside of the shells, I tried to adhere the flowers to the shells in a way other than tying/sticking them to the shells. Wanting to keep to the organic materials and aesthetic, I used candle wax to create the flowers to attach to the shells. Visually, I really love how it came out, looking so strange, like an organism, almost alien-like.

I really loved how this turned out, so I wanted to expand this and bring back the string in my previous assemblages, but have them arranged more purposeful.

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I the bottom left picture, you can see how the candle wax fell on the string and then dripped onto the leaves. It looks like rain droplets.

Burned Soil

For my real site interventions, I wanted to focus on the greenery and subvert the way I could insert myself into the site.

The first thing I thought to do was to bring an iron out and act out I was ‘ironing’ the grass flat. This didn’t translate well in my photos, so I thought of another way- using the iron to ‘burn’ the grass.

Obviously without having the Iron plugged in or actually having heat, I found a spot I could use. I pressed the iron down into the clovers, leaving behind an imprint of the iron. To create the illusion of the grass being burned, I started to rip out the cloves in the shape of the iron and having the brown soil be the ‘burned’ imprint.

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Not quite satisfied with the look, I put potting mix on top of the exposed dirt.

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This turned out great in creating the look of the iron burning into the cloves.

https://youtu.be/RHoN6ZZB7eY

Plaiting the grass

Wanting to continue working with grass, I thought it would be cool to plait the long grass as if it was human hair. This was personify nature and create a gentleness, feminine presence in the site.

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i thought that it would be good to have a video of me plaiting the grass, showing myself involved in the site as well as clearly show how I am intervening.

I found this to be really relaxing and calming. A peculiar way to appreciate the site and to insert me into it.

Pot Plants

I found these clay cylinder pipes lying around my house and tried to find a way to use them. I decided to place them around some flowers, making a pot plant, without pulling the flowers out from the ground. I found this to be really interesting no one really puts things around flowers while they’re in the ground, they’re either plucked from the ground or grown from inside a pot. Whereas here, they’re not removed from the ground or grown in a pot and can be appreciated as an untamed beauty.

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Ana Mendiete

Mendiete was a Cuban-American Performance artist and sculptor. In her self-portrait series, Silueta, Mendieta placed her body in natural environments and either had the elements of the earth cover her body or had her body’s imprint.

I thought this was a really beautiful way to create self-portraits and intervene a site with her body. In some, she dug the silhouette of her body or set it on fire…her work represents the experiences of a woman, there’s pain, violence, peace and gentleness.

Mendieta works show us her upbringing in Cuba and Taíno practise and her belief in the earth being a goddess. Having been exiled from her homeland at a young age, Mendieta felt “cast out from the womb” and was desperate to “return to the natural source” and to “become one with the earth.”

I really love her work and how she connects herself to a site. I would like to somehow connect femininity into my site interventions and prioritise nature as part of the sculpture.

Bibliography

“Ana Mendieta” Artsey.net, https://www.artsy.net/artist/ana-mendieta

Brough, Jennifer, “This Artwork Changed My Life: Ana Mendiete’d ‘Silueta’ Series.”, September 1, 2020. https://www.artsy.net/series/artworks-changed-lives/artsy-editorial-artwork-changed-life-ana-mendietas-silueta-series

I decided to go inside my closet. I do not occupy this space usually, I just stand in the doorway and grab what it is that I need. I found it to be really cramped and quickly began to feel panicked and overwhelmed with all the materials and objects around me. When I came out and looked into my closet I had a memory of when I used to hide and make forts inside my closet as a kid- my way to escape into another world as a comfort space. With this memory, I intervened by removing things out and putting things back in to make it a sleeping, cosy spot. Yes, it was comfy but it was still completely dark and felt a bit ominous. Wanting to change this, I added in one more thing- a lava lamp. I thought this was the perfect fix to bring light in with the bonus aesthetic of childhood nostalgia- A simple lamp or torch would’ve had a harsh light and simply would not have fit my goal of comfort.

Being inside my closet and having it be a place of calmness and comfort was a strange experience because for a long time it has been an ’empty’ space- it wasn’t a place I inhabited. The space usually made me feel dreadful or rushed as usually I’m running late and need to grab something as well as would neglect the chore to organise or clean the space. So by intervening and turning it into a space in which I could inhabit and could shut things out that made me feel uneasy or uncomfortable just for a moment, was really nice. I feel like I could stay in there for days if I wanted to.

Artist Research: Tracey Emin

In the installation, My Bed, 1998, Emin confesses to her vulnerable and depressed mental state after a break-up by showing us her bed. Her real bed, with rubbish, vodka bottles and dirt sheets was brought into the Tate Museum in 1998. The private and intimate state of her bed is brought into a big and exposing Museum, she’s intervened and placed her bedroom into a public place for judgement.

Bibliography

Cohen, Alina, “Tracey Emin’s ‘My Bed’ Ignored Society’s Expectations of Women”, Artsey.net, July 30, 2018. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-tracey-emins-my-bed-ignored-societys-expectations-women

Duane Hanson is a sculptor based in America. In his works, he creates life-like human figures and poses them in an ordinary or mundane way. He creates these realistic figures by casting real people, filling the moulds with materials such as bronze, resin or fibreglass and then intricately painting the hyperrealistic details of skin etc as well as using real clothes on the figures.

His work is about showing the beauty in the ordinary, the imperfections and emotions of people as he said, “My art is not about fooling anyone, It’s the human attitudes that I’m after- fatigue, a bit of frustration, rejection. To me, there is a kind of beauty to all of this.”

His work explores themes of Versilimmilitude as he creates work to look real and very truthful. Despite this depiction of normalcy and mundane ‘reality’, this work comes across as unsettling because of how uncanny it is. Humans psychologically don’t like things that look too ‘real’ because we can’t comprehend them- we assume it to be strange, scary and off-putting.

http://www.artnet.com/artists/duane-hanson/

Australian contemporary Artist, Erwin Wurm is best known for his unorthodox depictions of real life, using many miscellaneous objects to create a sculpture. He questions what it means for something to be a sculpture in his series One Minute Sculptures. In this continues work since the 80s, Wurm encourages people to pose with objects in an unusual way, what some people may think is funny or quirky.

The Organisation of Love is a live sculpture associated with his One Minute Sculptures series. In this sculpture, there is a plinth and filled water bottles and instructions written down on paper on how to perform this sculpture. Viewers are invited to stand on the plinth and complete the sculpture with their bodies and hold it for one minute.

I found this work to be interesting as Wurm is exploring ways our bodies can interact with objects as well as challenges how anyone and anything can be a sculpture. It’s peculiar because would anyone chose to hold bottles like that by themselves? What if the bottles were not there? Does this have a deeper meaning than making ‘funny’ works? Is Wurm challenging the classist and elitist art critics who say what is a ‘real’ sculpture?

Bibliography

“Chirstichurch’s Centre of Contemporary Art to reopen Saturday.” The Stuff, Feb 10, 2016. https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/christchurch-life/art-and-stage/visual-art/76712407/christchurchs-centre-of-contemporary-art-to-reopen-saturday

“Erwin Wurm Biography”,Artnet. http://www.artnet.com/artists/erwin-wurm/biography

“‘Organisation of Love’, Erwin Wurm, 1997-2005.” The Tate, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/wurm-organisation-of-love-t15257#:~:text=Organisation%20of%20Love%202007%20is,a%20period%20of%20sixty%20seconds.

This brief is called Verisilmilitude as is about investigating and finding new ways to show the truth, as Bartolommeo Fazio described, verisimilitude, the appearance of truth.

Verisimilitude is closely associated with representation as that is what we think of when we try to show the ‘truth’ in art. Artists have explored different ways to challenge what we perceived to be real or representational, such as making things too human-like that they become uncanny or scary.

Anything could be a sculpture, so using our bodies we can create awkward or unusual poses that question verisimilitude.

In our task today, we are to make 8 One Minute Sculptures using the resources around us.

I wasn’t so confident in this task because I couldn’t come up with original ideas to create and come across as ignorant or incapable. I did sort of have to push through these insecurities and just make something. I wasn’t feeling the greatest so this was the best that I could do. I experimented with balancing things and the distribution of weight. Use my body as an object, holding things like a stand.

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I believe that these chosen works best reflect the different paint/material and image processing techniques I have learned in the Process to Image brief. During this brief, I have learned to generate impetus and to apply it into my working methods and allowing myself to be more intuitive while I am working, rather than being restrictive and pre-determined. I really enjoyed being able to find different ways to apply and create images as it has expanded my knowledge in creating visually interesting works. I found the more work I generated, the more I allowed myself to be fluid and gestural with my materials, I was breaking down the internalised barrier of having my work look ‘perfect’ and teaching myself when to stop before I over-worked a painting. The processes I really enjoyed was soaking paper with paint, mixing paint while I worked and layering paint with pencil. I experiment in different ways to compliment and contrast techniques, doing this taught me how to balance my works with the different techniques I layered, such as thick paint/thin paint, big brushstrokes/thin pencil lines as well as keeping my work really expressive. If I were to continue, I would really love to keep doing bigger scale works (like I had started to do before lockdown) and to lean more into doing abstract works.

I decided to a painting that was very fluid and gestural. I kept the background light and watery, letting the paint bleed into each other. Wanting to something that was still loose and fluid, I decided to layer on a thick paint. I really love how the two techniques compliment and contract each other- they’re of different viscosity and both hold the unrestrictive movement of the paintbrush and the mixing of paint.

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