Sarah+Alden+2014

Sarah Alden Sculpture 1 11/4/14 (I can't figure out why all the pictures are sideways...sorry)

I have taken drawing and painting classes before, but I have never taken a sculpture class. After taking drawing and painting classes I go to museums and am blown away by what some people can create. There are always pieces that look impossible to make. They are detailed beyond belief, their accuracy on point, and absolutely above anything I could ever create. Then there are pieces I walk up to and the first thought I have is; "that's art?" and the second; "I could easily make that." (I have a huge ego). Before taking art classes, the distinction between these two was undefined and everything was something I could do. After taking art classes, I realized making beautiful, creative, inspiring, emotionally provocative art is really, really, really hard.

The same goes for sculpture, before taking this course sculpture was an unknown territory to me. It looks really cool and maybe if I tried it I'd be really good at it. Walking through museums, without understanding the processes that go into sculptures and the time and creativity they take to create, I believed I could potentially make any of the pieces I saw (except for the huge installations and massive iron cast structures, again huge ego, way overestimating my art making abilities). Now that I've begun creating sculptures I have come to realize that it is actually impossible. I am learning the methods and the processes that artists use to create their work and it is very hard, time consuming work. It puts in perspective the flawlessness of the pieces in the museum and boggles my mind that people have the talent and drive to create such complicated pieces. It puts my artistic ego in check for sure, which is a great, much needed thing.

Pieces that use scale:



Sarah Alden Sculpture 1 10/6/14

I will be using Andy Goldsworthy as an artist inspiration for this project. I really enjoy his work and have been following his art for a long time. When I was a junior in high school I took a Media Studies class as a seminar and my teacher introduced me and my peers to Andy Goldsworthy’s work. I was immediately stunned by his skill with the fragility of nature and his eye for creating unnatural shapes in nature. I want to turn his concept of bringing nature into weird and odd forms that may or most likely not be found naturally in the wild on its head and make a piece that takes a natural form and makes it look unnatural. These are two examples of Goldsworthy taking nature and making it look staged and unnatural.

There is a lot in Andy Goldsworthy’s work that focuses on support, keeping a structure up and together when in nature it would not naturally stay together. I have always loved the nests he makes out of different found items in nature, he has made them out of stone, wood, ice, really anything he can get his hands on that he can stack and get to be structurally stable. Many of these pieces stay standing for a long time because he is so good at piecing things together. He also focuses a lot on color and the aesthetics of a piece that draw the eye. Most of his work is photographed and look much crazier and awesome then they do in person because of color contrast, light, and shadows in the photograph.

For this project, using Goldsworthy as an inspiration, I want to make a nest like this out of leaves made of wood. To do this I will start by cutting the plank of wood down the middle longways to make it thinner. Then I will draw out my leave on the wood and carve them out. I then will take all the scraps and make them thin lines which will then become the lines on the leaves that make up the veins of the leaf. I want it to resemble one of Goldsworthy’s domes while enrapturing the idea of taking something from nature that wouldn’t normally come together in that shape and forcing it into a structure that stands on its own.