After what I can only call the turtle incident, I got a little lost. I felt uninspired and my work was way to literal. There was no process or experimentation and I hated that. After speaking to other classmates and Kate she sent me the artist Vera Kox. Her sculptures where elusive and abstract, only ever hinting to a theme or context. Her work really intrigued me and held so many properties that I wish my work could possess. Her sculptures explored scale, texture and the contrast between the man made and the natural, something I was very interested in.
It inspired me to take on a much more abstract take in my project, hinting to subject without out rightly saying it. My work up until this point has been largely surrounding the environment, consumerism and finding or refinding purpose in thrown away items ( primarily cigarette butts because of the vast number of them). My work had become a bad GCSE activist campaign, much too literal and not interesting at all. Not my best work at all.
I began exploring Vera Kox's work and I found the image of the sculpture shown below. I absolutely loved the mix of materials and abstract layout. It encouraged me to begin using my own found materials and begin to make some temporary sculptures. I was very interested in the use of scale in my sculptures, being at home the only way people are going to be able to see the sculptures is through imagery and photographs. I hoped through photography I could make the small sculptures appear much larger. The materials I had collected where a mix of rubbish from university and things around the house that where either in the bin or going to be binned. Items included but where not limited to: 6 year out of date blue slush puppy syrup, Tobaccco from cigarette butts, cigarette butts, sun tan oil, mouldy sand from sandpit we cleaned out, old and hardened acrylic paint, oil and pebbles from under a bush. From a bad piece, ive been exploring theme and artists and now will begin my experiments in sculpture. Hopefully they go well.
