The past couple weeks have been super busy! In 3D figure studio we’ve been working from a live model still. I’m starting to get the hang of working in 3 dimensions from a model, which means rotating around the model instead of staying in the same spot. We’ve still been using the wire mesh, trace paper, and model magic, but we’re getting more in depth with the model magic now. We’ve had a few separate poses that have 3 or 4 sessions each. For the most recent one, we got to a point where the figures all started looking pretty similar to the model, since we started sanding down the dry model magic like smooth skin.
On Tuesday mornings, we’ve been wrapping up our first seminar project on Vulnerability. I’m done with mine, and I’ll post a photo as soon as I finish hanging it. Last weekend, I spent about 22 hours total working on it! I started with a mirror, which I projected text onto the back of. I traced and exacto-d the text onto the mirror backing, then scraped away the backing wherever there was text. When you look at the front of the piece, you’re looking into a mirror but where there is text you can see through the mirror to the wall.
On Tuesday afternoons we’ve been going on field trips and getting into creating artist portfolio websites! A couple weeks ago we went to the ICA to see some new stuff, which was great. The two shows that we saw were completely different from each other but I loved them both- Nick Cave had large colorful found-object sculptures, and William Kentridge had a beautiful installation and film about the destruction of time. I definitely recommend seeing both of them!
In my art history classes, things are moving right along. In Ideas of Western Art II, we had our first test last week on Early and High Italian Renaissance and Italian Baroque art. In Women, Art & Society, we had our first paper due on Wednesday. Our assignment was to visit the Museum of Fine Arts and write on three pieces by women artists in a few select sections of the museum. Among others, I wrote on artist Lorna Simpson and fell in love with her work. She explores ideas of gender and race through photography and text with extremely powerful imagery.
On Thursdays, my all day sculpture class is doing a LOT. We have two projects going on right now- one of them is a suitcase project, where we have to create a suitcase that is sort of an autobiography sculpture. For the other project, we each picked an object from a particular room in the Harvard Natural History museum. Now we’re recreating that object with a material that isn’t typically sculptural, for example a food or an article of clothing. For my suitcase, I’ve been thinking of creating sort of old fashioned film slides to put words and images on, but I’m still in the early stages. For the museum project, the object I picked is a water dipper made from a palm leaf, which I think I’ll recreate with a water soluble material to render the water dipper aspect useless.