Laying Figure
Found Objects
200x100x100cm
My final piece for my final major project at foundation at the Royal Drawing School: a found object sculpture using mainly industrial and mechanical parts, that I made with the intention of showing the tension and discomfort of anxiety, with each individual object’s past use bringing an action or metaphor to the body part it’s now representing. I chose a laying pose as a challenge to break the common associations of comfort and relaxation that come with it and show the awkward, jagged situation the figure lies in.
Compound Artefact
Bronze and concrete
60x65x30cm
This sculpture was an exercise in expanding my idea of what collage could be. Instead of the usual process of finding images and cutting them out of their surroundings and combining them onto another surface I thought I would attempt to cut out three dimensional textures and combine them on a three dimensional surface. I did so by pushing animal bones and found bits of metal into a rolled out slab of soft clay to leave an indentation and drawing into the clay with a stick. I then poured molten wax into the indentations to create positive casts. I then cut out these wax casts and ‘collaged’ them onto a flat rectangle of wax. I trimmed excess wax around the objects to avoid empty areas and turned it over to add texture to the back by melting areas with hot metal and painting on molten wax with a brush. I used this wax object to cast a bronze using the lost wax process. The flat rectangular shape felt a little like flag once it came out of the plaster and so I gave it colour by patinating it and welded it onto a flag pole of bronze and planting it in a concrete block. The piece is an exploration of textures and the sense of heaviness that comes from the chosen materials. It has an industrial and heavy-handed feel, unlike a lot of artists bronzes that capitalise on bronze’s ability to support very delicate and thin shapes. The work occupies a shared space with my 2D work as it too tries to grapple with this idea of layers, accumilation of disparate and alien objects and the fine line between flatness and depth.
