Works in Process, August 2017 - December 2017

This semester, I wanted to accomplish two things - focusing in on a set of ideas related to concepts that are important to me, and finding a body of work, or more accurately a baseline form that I was comfortable with using to represent these ideas. Initially, I had the idea of making pieces that were designed to help instill a sense of piece or ease in the viewer. I drew inspiration from the forms and design of the rock-gardens and cairns sometimes found in offices and therapy centers:

I quickly discovered a few things. Firstly, the driving forces behind the calming nature of these office sculptures are actually a complex interaction of different elements, working together to create a calming effect about the piece. I initially thought the effect would be easy to replicate, but it turned out to be much more complicated than I expected.

Secondly, I realized I didn't have a strong enough foundation in the form I was working with, nor did I have an understanding of the underlying design concepts that made my reference material successful, and as such I was effectively trying to replicate these ideas without really understanding them.

Lastly, I came to understand that even though there was an excellent challenge in attempting to understand replicate the root ideas that made these objects successful, in the end this was only one of many ideas that could be pursued, and eventually it would no longer yield new insights and discoveries.

Instead, I chose to pursue a body of work that would more generally reference the individual, and allow me to investigate any of a broad spectrum of ideas and notions. I chose to reference the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey for its analogous relation to the entities around it.

So I began to create forms. I let intuition guide the work primarily, rather than create and follow a blueprint via drawing. This is one of the first objects that came from this process of working:

The form read to me as a bit bland and unappealing, so I decided to give it a pebbled texture broken by a band of flat surface, to investigate the significance of the patterned surfaces in the reference objects.

I also wanted to investigate the concept of security, so I crafted a "companion" for the object I had already created. I used a similar surface treatment to establish a relationship between the two objects.

I also applied an Alberta Slip terra sigillatta to unify the design concepts of the two, and to regulate the surface such that it wasn't too glossy (such as it could be with a glaze) but also wasn't matte. It created a pleasant even ground between gloss and matte. These pieces ended up overfiring and turning the terra sig into a glaze anyway, but this technique appears successfully in other pieces later on.

After firing the pieces, I was left with two robust forms that were interconnected and referenced the individual. I wanted to investigate how they would interact with one another organically, and not relegate them to being shown only in a gallery context. So I took them out into nature to investigate how the narrative and the atmosphere of the pieces transformed when placed in different scenarios and contexts.

Here are a few of the ones I think were the most successful:

While photographing, I noticed something interesting occurring. In some arrangements, the environment doesn't produce enough clues to the scale of one object versus the other, and as such the pieces seem to grow and shrink relative to each other, appearing equal in size in some frames when they are really of significantly different sizes.

At this point I began to consider the importance of the negative space shown in each object. I noticed that it seemed to draw attention to the form and the fact that one could see through it, but in the same way causing the viewer to perceive the entire object at the same time rather than parts of it individually. I created new pieces to attempt to understand this better, putting them in similar scenarios, with and without the first two objects:

From the first two objects, I also noticed how powerful of an effect the editing could have on the outcome of the images. I had experimented with cold versus warm colors in editing, but I had noticed that cold colors could induce different emotions than warm, and wanted to investigate. I had a piece shatter in the kiln, but in it I realized I had the opportunity I wanted. Note the difference from the images above, which are edited to emphasize warm colors, where the image below is edited to emphasize cold colors:

I also wanted to see if I could push the idea of abstracting the actual size, shape, and orientation of the pieces via the method of photography. Utilizing a slightly rolling embankment next to the lake, I was able to achieve a very exaggerated form of this :

As well as trying to create an optical illusion abstracting the actual sizes of each object:

These are the most recent outcomes of my work so far. Although through critique I have determined that the images are challenging to display in conjunction with the pieces themselves, I am very interested in seeing how much further I can take the photography, especially utilizing photography tricks to distort the viewer's perception. I also look forward to continuing my foray into understanding the connection between aesthetic elements and emotion in the forms, as so far these explorations have yielded some great results.