Thursday, December 13, 2012
To Teach or Not To Teach
Aaron, you ask a lot of questions about who’s teaching in
New York State. Every time I sit in panic mode. It’s not because jobs are
limited and disappearing like the budgets in school art departments, as the
requirements for our classes are getting more and more difficult. It’s because
I have minimal interest in proceeding with this a career.
For the past five years I’ve been a camp counselor, one of
those years being a director in the ceramic area. This is an experience that I
love doing and would like to continue. Sadly, this past summer may have been my
last year, despite being the full-time Ceramic Director at the camp for the
summer. This is an opportunity that provides me with a budget (outrageous and
impractical in any other setting), six periods per day, kilns, and glaze to
manage with two different classes, hand building and wheel. It’s a very
comfortable but close preparation for teaching. But it’s this comfort and
informality that I enjoy, which I won’t find in a public school.
This summer I plan on doing an internship within the ceramic
world to prepare me to be a working artist, my chosen path. Hopefully one day,
I’ll come full circle and teach again but perhaps at the college level where my
work won’t hurt my reputation but enhance it.
Book Sculpture Lesson
Today’s lesson was very interesting. It involved
manipulating books to create sculptures that were based off of the content in
the book itself. The unit was transformation and while I understand the
applications of transforming the physicality ad functionally of the book, the
unit theme did not expand much past there. They discussed the additive and
subtractive qualities of extracting pages and reworking them to create the
sculpture within the book. Aaron took up issues with the idea of additive and
subtractive methods in this way since it was just a movement (or
transformation) of the pages, not adding or subtracting something new. However,
this does not bother me. What I do find important in this conversation is the
construction of form or suggested form out of 2-d.
It was a lesson that everyone was completely engaged in on
an honest level. I think it was the surprise in the media and the chance the
physically construct something like our own little world that made s so
dynamic. Having that control and ownership in something that is so fun, new,
and unexpected will intrigue and inspire the students in a very positive manner
as it did for our group.
Static Vs. Dynamic Lesson
Sara and Shannon’s lesson talked about composition and
achieving both static and dynamic variations of composition. I think this is an
interesting way to introduce the idea. It forces students to act out what is
actually a successful and unsuccessful composition in terms of arrangement and
space. Having the Elements and Principles of Art be a factor in the lesson but
not the outright driving force is important. If the lesson is to learn these
elements, including composition, then no student is going to understand or want
to take the time to conceptualize how to make them work positively in personal
work. By having it been a silent but apparent factor in the lesson, it is a
more likely that students will be interested and understand the content.
This is my version of the dynamic composition. It was
explained that a dynamic composition had the objects arrange to lead the
viewer’s eye around the page and from one object to the next. I put my objects
in a way so that they were sort of stacked to create layering as an interesting
dimension as well as pointing between the objects that were carried throughout
the composition by the piece or bark.
What may make the lesson stronger is to add another level to
contribute to why some compositions or successful over others and how a
composition can work conceptually.
Kate MacDowell
Kate MacDowell is a ceramic artist
who works primarily with porcelain in order to represent life size and
realistic aspects of natures through her sculptures. She discusses ideas of
nature, environment, and our relation to these as humans.
Her process includes making hand
built life size animals and plant-life out of porcelain. Classical and baroque
marble sculpture, or contemporary tomb sculpture, are influences for her choice
of porcelain since its color focuses on form and evokes a ghostly feeling of
negative space to suggest something missing from world.
She enjoys this luminescent and ghost-like quality of
porcelain and the ability of bone-dry repair. She compiles a board of images
from picture books and Google images consisting of scientific drawings,
skeletal sketches for proportions, and photos of road kill and hunting. She
build solid around a newspaper and then hallows out the forms for it to be a
quarter inch thick. Each part is built then stored in a wet box until she is
ready to construct the sculpture together. She repairs throughout the making
and firing process, fixing any cracks that appear due to the nature of
porcelain. The work is then glazed clear in some spots and fired to cone 5.
She discusses the conflict between
our longing for love of the nature environment and our negative impacts on it.
The human body and its organs are transformed and often being taken over by and
or becoming a specific plant. Solastalgia is a dislocation and loss of what
people feel to see their home environment being destroyed or under assault,
which was a beginning focus of her work. The pieces that represent this are a
physical connection between nature and body to refer to psychological
connection. As the viewer, the work suggests that you put yourself in place of
sculpture, experiencing the sensuality, disturbing or unsettling experience of
sympathetic response to piece. The piece Venus, explores the experience of
seduction without using a woman’s body, carnivorous plants bloom from the human
heart. It is the fecundity of natural world is something that she explores
often. Based on mythology, she specifically looks at the sculpture of Daphne
and Apollo discussing the conflict between fear and beauty as the nymph
transforms into a tree the escape rape by Apollo. Her version of this Daphne
sculpture is an experience of a new issue in the environment. The Daphne that
once used nature to be her escape has been cut down in clear-cut zones. It can
be seen as an Ecofeminist analogy. She finds that what is left out is more
important than what is included. Her work forces you to explore the
subconscious and delve into fear of mortality, based on slow and painful rise
and fall of evolutionary species.
Thesis in relation to AP
My life has been consumed with Thesis. The troubles of
thinking about it, the troubles of spending other time not thinking about it
which is an all too often problem, and the troubles I’m exploring through it.
A yearlong project. Daunting. But something that is not
enough time outside of the academic world. But let’s remember that I’m here to
discuss my art within the academic setting. In high school I took AP Art
realistically as a portfolio building class. While my high school art career
was less than ideal, the experience of a yearlong project is still a factor.
You focus on a specific topic that caries throughout your work. It’s a deep investigation
concentrating and putting ideas through a visual media.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)