Work in progress- after the second firing, third firing in progress...

Life Size. Ceramic, glaze, underglaze. Yet to be titled....

 

I started this piece last summer during a two week long class I taught to middle school aged students at the Ceramic Center in Cedar Rapids. Most of the students were a part of a summer program for low-income students and were taking this class because they wanted to get out of their daily routine at camp. There were a few students who were in to art, but many were not. As I often do, I work along side my students at around the same pace as they work so they can see how I work through problems, persist and edit. I also would rather show how to make a nose for example on my work rather than theirs. 

 

The research in this piece started by taking 20 selfies from different angles in two different poses- hence the two faces. I originally wanted to create two different emotional expressions, and it came out in the end rather subtly. I had never created a life sized self portrait before and researched different ways to do this on the internet, taking into account structural techniques and figuring in the easiest and fastest ways for middle school students to accomplish this. We worked using slabs, and constructed supports inside the piece. I showed the students different examples of narrative figure modeling and challenged them to create a piece that showed an aspect of themselves, real or imagined by creating expression in the sculpture or by narrative storytelling on the surface of the sculpture. Though I didn’t finish my piece by the end of the two week class, the class was a success.

 

I took the piece home and it lay dormant under a moist cloth throughout much of the summer. I took it to school and tinkered with it throughout the year between projects when I wanted to spend time making art with my students. During the process I cut it apart several times, once fully down the middle into quarters (much to the horror of my students). I scraped the face of several times and started over, and my students got to experience what it was like to edit and revise in clay.

 

As I worked my students added to the meaning and direction of the art by giving me feedback. One face looked more masculine, which happened to be the face I was more closely modeling to my own. The other face, with a softer more pleasant expression was generally thought to be the feminine face, so I accentuated the gender specific features of the two faces. A teacher walked in and related the sculpture to the two faced god Janus, so I researched him. He is the god of the future and the past, to beginnings and ends. As I started to think about narrative I was deep into the research of ecological art, both in my co-taught class and from the class with Sutton, so I created a narrative of man and nature painted on the surface. Pollution and life, sky and water, contentment and concern.

 

The research of the piece happened at all stages of the art making, and inspiration was taken from many different sources. Sometimes the research I did was literal, researching trees, and animals, taking images from the ADM plant in Cedar Rapids to inform my images. Sometimes the research I did was conversational, probing my audience what they thought was happening and using that input to guide the direction may art took.

 

The work is still in progress, as my technical research continues. I experiment with glazes and finishes, details and layers. We’ll see where the next month takes me, but I have to give myself a deadline or I fear this piece will never be done.