Crit Information

Crit Session 1: Discussion and Formative Feedback

Occurring over two class sessions:
Session 1 Week 6 23 April
Session 2 Week 7 30 April

Session 1
These people, seen in session 1, can collect completed rubrics following the end of session 2, on Thursday.
Akura
Richard
Hannah
Soo Hyun
Emily
Shinae
Brydie
Ellen Claire
Zac

Session 2
Renee
Sian
Yoonkyung
Sung-Hi
Matthew
Lia
Ruby

Please attend both sessions

Renee

Description
I have had trouble starting this project as I just wanted to experiment in the workshops but wasn't making anything that was worthy of this project.
I have however got starting points that I am now developing.
My 1st idea was to experiment with the make up or creation of people and objects.
Another idea was to experiment with the shape of a circle/ring and the different readings I would get from this shape when materials, size and colour were changed.
I have experimented with clay, plaster and wax so far.
Regarding to my 1st idea I did a cast of my face and made a mold out of wax which was set in different layers of colours, this is meant to give an idea that these colours represent me in a certain way relating to cultural influences?
I do need and want to get different interpretations from these objects at the crit though so I can resolve it further.
I havn't really got much of a diagram because I've hit a wall.

In regards to research with the 1st idea I liked artists that did self portraits and face molds such as, Jo Lee and Agnes Arellano


And with the second idea my research has been mostly about the meaning of a circle, Religon, Feminism, Earth, Life.

Akura

Description
Initially I was interested in disrupting habitual perceptions surrounding everyday objects and developing contradictions between objects and there functions.
The objects of my attentions were cotton buds and sewing needles. I sought to make casts from these objects, to develop an understanding of casting and mold making materials and processes.

So far I have found myself drawn to, and producing work with cotton buds. My interest in sewing needles has since waned.
I am particularly drawn to the hesitant, unsettling feeling cotton buds evoke when taken out of the home or healthcare context. It is startling how an object so ubiquitous and familiar can suddenly become intimidating and cautionary for one to hold.
This awareness created between the body and the object provoked me to investigate this further by exploiting the estrangement or disjointedness of an object when removed from its usual context, associations, materials and function, specifically with casting.

Having made cast piles of cotton buds in rubber, latex and silicone crammed together in a plastic, de-aerated mold I was struck by the new, bodily qualities the materials introduced in to the casts. The latex casts once dried turned a dirty yellowish-brown, which resembled the colour of pus. It is by far the most disturbing of the casts. The latex smells to high heaven like an infection and has a rather organic appearance. The silicone molds resemble the colour of semen and have a slimy, slippery texture. I have experimented with cutting away the excess silicone and now I see the casts as chromosomes or microscopic bacteria made visible to the human eye.


Research:

Rachel Whiteread. Venice Biennale 1997.
Fine Arts Library
759 W593b
Pg 29-35

- An interview with Whiteread which has and still is assisting me while I am working with casting materials and there manipulation to create new sensations in my work.

Soo Byun

Ruby

Description
I am working with the idea (in short) of presence found in absence. I am investigating this idea in three different directions.

• Firstly, by re-arranging and photographing stranger’s inorganic junk, I create new narratives from possessions that are no longer wanted, recreating life in the lifeless.
• Secondly I plan to look into what it is in an object that draws us in, what provokes the imagination. By selecting small enticing objects, I will detract from them their contexts or properties which make them enticing or attractive and place them in a new form, to analyze their effect in a new environment
• Ritualistic Space. The space or place in which we interact/play/react. To these objects

The photographs are named Car. Boat. House.

Between them are the domestic connection, of the American dream for wealth, expectation and fulfillment. But they are made intentionally shabby, through the photography medium and the materials of junk. They are an impression of the used, and a playful approach, like of an imaginative child to bring those ideals and qualities back, and to make use of what we have here and now.

The objects will be displayed with the intention of being picked up, played with, tried on. They are also to provoke a childlike experience to make use of the familiar, discarded. I will manipulate small enticing things to provoke imagination.

The ritualistic space will be explored to create a place possible of these



Reference:
I have been reading
Emerge : Sue de Beer / [text by Shamim M. Momin ... [et al.] (2005)
Call number: 770 D2865 at Fine Arts Library

Sue De Beer takes many of her narratives that run through her films and photographs from short stories and extracts from friends and writers, I have looked at the way I which she has translated the text to image, such as ‘Burnt’ By Trinnie Dalton pg 55-56, which influences the emotion and imagery, such as symbolic use of sue de beers work such as the relationship between pop culture and horror films for example, seen in Black Sun images pgs 116-126.

Lia

Ellie

Description
'All art aspires to the condition of muisc' - Walter Pater
Perhaps I can find a way to elevate art to this condition, by translating visual art into a musical language.The work I am developing investigates the function of the music box as a way to catalogue and store information. The original found music boxes store data, i.e. the songs 'encoded' on them, which are simplified to a basic geometric pattern. I'm interested in the translation of information: from a visual language, into an audio language, by means of a tangible object. We humans naturally hunt for patterns in everything we experience. Music itself is just a collection of sound patterns. My work attempts to draw parallels between pattern-hunting in the two mediums by translating found visual patterns into music using the music box. I'm interested in the tension between mathematical/ mechanical order vs. human imagination/error, and also the tension between ramondomness and the human desire for pattern.

Emily

Description
So far, I have experimented with thin metal, natural light, transparent objects (glad wrap) and reflective surface. I am finding difficulty with keeping the miniature structure upright at the moment.

I see the structures exploring the interaction between the object and reflection. I want to make works with an appreciation for natural objects that can defy gravity.

Factors of interest:
• Weird central points of balance – goes beyond natural world elements
• Balance, large-scale, architectural
• Light – reflections
• Movement: continuous, flowing movement
Should I focus on one of these or some or all?


Reference
Immaterial: Brancusi, Gabo, Maholy-Nagy. (2004)
Available at Fine Arts Library 709.04 133b

Matt

Description

My ideas have changed since the beginning of this project. Initially I felt bound to the rubber chicken and bottle and was mainly interested in changing their materiality. Since this experimentation, I have been thinking - a rubber chicken is a rubber chicken and a bottle is a bottle, whatever material it is made out of, so what comes next? At the same time, some of the forms I was making started to remind me of how nature can take over a form and create a seemingly impossible new form. An example of this is the aluminium bottle cast forced inside the rubber chicken and an image I found of a snake eating a baby hippopotamus. The rubber chicken and snake are left in an intermediate metamorphic state referencing the form they have just consumed.


From this idea I have became interested in process and how making something can lead to the formation of new visual and practical connections for producing new sculptures. At the moment I am working on two pieces which investigate transformation of objects and the process that created them. One is a mold made out of broken glass bottles, which takes on a form resembling a bulging section of a snake. The other is a sculpture of a snake, part transformed into the crowbar I used to smash the bottles for the previous mold. From these, I aim to carry out different processes to make new works which follow on in a connected way from the previous sculptures.

My rethought approach to this project is to make my sculptural process an inanimate object, where the processes used and connections made within the body work can be observed by an audience.




Reference
A book I’m reading at the moment is Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis and other stories (833.91 K12Fm). Metamorphosis is the first story (about 50 pages), it’s funny and interesting. There’s a bit on wikipedia.com about it as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis

Kathryn

1. Description of My Project

Ideas:
- Hope
- Giving & Receiving
- Value of an object and how it can change
- Mass production of objects

I became interested in lucky paper stars and how something that is considered valuable (as a gift and the apparent ability to grant a wish) has become such a mass produced, commercialized product.

I am also interested in how something so vulnerable and very much worthless (material-wise) is transformed into something powerful, to which people invest their hopes into – regardless of whether they actually believe in the idea of a wish being granted. People claim they don’t believe it, yet they still keep clinging on to these objects of apparent value or power.

By bronze casting each paper star, I am playing with the idea of value – the process and the outcome. Bronze is more valuable than paper, and while it takes less than a minute to create a star out of paper, it takes days to prepare and cast a bronze star.

Also, starting a mission of collecting 1,000 paper stars with each one containing a different person’s wish written on it and initialed by them, I’m exploring the concept of hope, mass production-yet-not, giving and receiving, and again, value.

I have come to realize that process is a very important aspect to my project, and the outcome may stay as an unfinished/process-based one.

Shinae Suh

Shinae Suh
I have experienced with the glass blowing, aluminum casting or plastic (Ezy cast) casting to make the singular unique bottle shapes, and give them functions on to the sculpture; what it means to be functioning, how projects are used, how they look like to the audience.. I decided to create objects which makes them singular objects and gives all different forms, functions and values to them; investigate the form and potential meaning of a found object. Also I will try to use other materials to create an interesting combination of materials providing multiple associations for viewers.

What interests me:

+ Glass blowing- can’t make exactly same forms all the time, like massive produce.

+ Photo- (Keep taking photos at the moment; can be documentation)

I think photography becoming sculpture- sculpture as installation and installation confined within a vitrine, in a sense framed.



Reference:

World sculpture news 57. Spring 2008. Pg 57-62

www.imma.ie then research Michael craig-martin, who is one of my artist model.

Brydie

The craftsmanship and detail that goes into “arts and crafts” such as knitting and crochet has become important to my work. Not denying naturally occurring flaws or signs of the artist’s hand. Calling household tasks “mindless” was demeaning to their beauty and integrity so I made a switch.

My work so far draws parallels between what have been considered specifically “men’s jobs” or specifically “women’s jobs”. I am interested in the details within these mundane objects, especially in the way they interact with light. For example the car door seen in my photo: recently removed from my own car draws on Jeff Thomson’s Lace works using metal and a plasma cutter. I attacked my door with a softer and more feminine pattern, taking away some of its rigidness. By painting it white I have also removed some on the roughness previously seen in the sanded-back metal and burnt red paint. The white finish opens up the possibility of projecting images onto its surface.

My latex doily's look decidedly like pancakes – drawing on the idea of a woman’s work being in the kitchen. In light of this I have presented them on tracing paper which resembles cooking paper where they sit like a saucy pile of pancakes, wet and glossy.

The interest in the way the light interacts with the objects can be seen in my photographs and stemmed from painting onto a metal pot and platter – cancelling out the reflective surface. The tarnishing and dirtiness of these objects is important as it speaks of their past lives in the kitchen rather than coming sparkling new – straight from a factory of mass production.

Link to reading : http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/589595?cookieSet=1&journalCode=wp

Emily

I have experimented with thin metal, natural light, transparent objects (glad wrap) and reflective surface. I am finding difficulty with keeping the miniature structure upright at the moment.

I see the structures exploring the interaction between the object and reflection. I want to make works with an appreciation for natural objects that can defy gravity.

Factors of interest:
• Weird central points of balance – goes beyond natural world elements
• Balance, large-scale, architectural
• Light – reflections
• Movement: continuous, flowing movement
Should I focus on one of these or some or all?


Reference:Immaterial: Brancusi, Gabo, Maholy-Nagy. (2004)
Available at Fine Arts Library 709.04 133b

Sian

After experiencing the failure of my initial object and taking in regard the questions that the previous object raised I am now investigating water and waterpolo. Looking into the materiality of the water and capturing aspects of the game and water movement in a sculptural way. Expressing the encompassing feeling of water around the body, the slowed motion of your bodies movement within the pool. Looking into the tension formed between the three components of body, water and movement. How the water reacts when in a contained form such as a pool and a person is introduced. By documenting the water’s movement with photographs and film I plan to take the captured forms produced by the water and person and turn the fluidity and motion of it into a sculptural frozen form.


form of the movement and mould
• Photograph/film
• Materials – polyester resin and fiber glass cloth
• Abstract
Underwater tension also creating forms on the surface



Reaction of water around the bodies movement
Solid object in a fluid atmosphere Bodily experience
• What you feel/touch
• What you see
• Can smell (chlorine)
• Can hear




Reference Article: Valerie Blass It’s a Surface Situation, By John K. Grande
Sculpture magazine Issue 27 November 2008
Pg 36 & 37

Hannah

Statement of how I see the work I am making...


At the moment my thinking has come to revolve around this idea of the
functional object and what it means to be functioning. How objects are
used and how people interact with them.
With a keen interest in how objects are displayed in space and work
with their surroundings
With this in mind I am planning on creating objects that work off
existing structures and pose as functional but are not. Using the
common idea of representing the familiar in an unfamiliar way.
By playing on the audiences understanding of how a certain object
works, the ideology of object, and slightly altering it in
material/installation so there is a shift in how the object is perceived.
The audience sees an object that appears to be functioning but deep
down they know that due to the alteration of the object it is not.
It’s about deciding what I am willing to reveal and conceal. How much
information into the object am I willing to give the audience.
The audience is asked to question whether what they are looking at is
functioning in the way that it appears to.
I think this idea of the non-functioning object creates quite a nice
parallel with modernist minimalist sculpture. Useless structures that
pose to be functioning in one-way or another.

The website for the research component is:
http://uselessobjects.com/

Ritchie

Description: By using the element of chance I'm creating images through the print process with my found object (guitar string). I'm responding to these images to create sculptures, then using the sculptures to create new images through a process of mark making.


Research reference: Book, Marie Raymond. Yves Klein pages 148-149 and 164-167 are pretty awesome. Heaps of cool sculpture stuff in it though. call number at fine art library is 759.4 R271.

Individual posts (1)

Information is required from each student:
1. Description of project
2. Documentation of experimentation,(photograph)
3. Diagram of personal process
4. Reference citation, (research source)

Please use the comments function to respond to the posts as they appear.
It is expected that students will be familiar with the processes of each of their colleagues prior to the Crit session which begins the first Thursday session following the Easter break.

Formative feedback will be made available following this session. Student will also be offered the opportunity to self assess prior to starting the Crit process.