Inspiration and the everyday

  I'm about half way through compiling slides for my presentation, so I decided to look up some more inspirational material.  I keep coming back to this awesome cephalopod, the vampire squid.  It's so cool, the shape, the bioluminescent lights, its big blue eye, and of course those cute little cephalopod ears/fins.  My favorite part about this creature is how it can turn inside out, and its form just becomes amazing!  I love it.  wrinkly and smooth, shiny and soft.  It's just so bizarre and entirely intriguing.  Like a floating colon of the deep.

Check out this awesome video of the vampire squid

Promachoteuthis sulcus (AHHH!!!)

I tend to get caught up in themes when it comes to image research, especially when it comes to sea life.  I'm attracted to all the varieties of ways sea life capture, ingest, and devour their food. The spectacle is wonderful.  It's a great source of inspiration for my work.  Sea anemones, squid, cephalopods, corals...  Easy to say, I can stare at aquariums all day, and I have, haha.

More recently, I've been more interested in creatures from the deep.  their mouths are fabulous.  for example, this cephalopod, Promachoteuthis sulcus, appears to have teeth.  I really like the sporadic nature of its suckers.  I just love looking at stuff like this.  Nature always seems to pose the best solutions to my sculpting problems.

I had this piece that i worked on for over 2 months (sadly, it exploded), of which almost an entire month was me adding on, tearing off and remodeling an opening on it.  I just couldn't get comfortable with how it looked. 

Fig. 1-- Bleh...

One of my SIUE friends had made a comment about being curious as to what the interior of my work would look like.  I'd been looking at a lot of colonoscopy pictures, and really enjoyed the bumps and ripples.  So, when I started this piece, I gave myself the criteria that I would have an internal space/cavity.  It was a fun and extremely painful experience.  I want to do it again, haha.  The following pics were all taken along the way. 

This is what I started out with.  No way in hell was I going to leave it like this.  One lovely thing about independent study that I really enjoyed was that I was able to have the time to tear this thing up over and over.  I learned so much about constructing in this manner.  It was a total in progress, trial-by-error deal. 
 

sweet interior colon shot

 Close up of the first "draft".  Since I had never made anything like this, it was interesting trying to sketch out any solution.  My general lack of experience with making sculpture wasn't very helpful either.  I was happy with the interior, but the transition to the outside just looked like something you'd see on a pot.  I started looking in my sketch book and at images online of sea anemones, octopus, anuses-- basically anything to help me figure out a way to make a convincing transition. 

 Another thing I failed to think about, besides the transition, was how i was going to build onto the form itself and not lose the puckering.  Getting the interior piece inside was easier than building the exterior up.  The picture on the right, and below, was my second attempt.  I decided to build out, and up.  I wasn't really happy with the outcome of that either.  it lacked balance, the tentacles just didn't fit the piece, and the over all height of the protrusion made it really hard to see the interior.  There were things that I enjoyed about the change.  I added some coils on the inside that I had modeled after intestines, and I really liked the rim on the top of the addition. 

enlarged to show texture, haha

The final treatment

I ended up with this as my final solution.  I recycled the rim, shortened it, and redid the intestinal coils.  I had thought about what else had failed on the last attempt, and decided to use more flexed anal muscle (thanks pink flamingos!) and less hemorrhoidal bumps.  I then worked back into the rim to model it more after an actual anus.   The whole thing magically became believable, and I walked away a wiser person. 

In the spray booth, getting a nice coat of sig.

This sculpture was one learning process after another.  I already knew how to slip cast and make moulds, but only how to make 1, 2 and 3 piece moulds.  I wanted to cast my whole arm.  I ended up buying algenate, and with the help of my friends elaine and scott, attempted to get a plaster positive of my arm.  it was a very, VERY cold and messy process-- I'd totally do it again.  I only got an arm out of that experience.  I had enough algenate left to get a good positive of my hand, which was very quick, and not nearly as big of a mess as when i did my whole arm.

Making the moulds was a challenge in itself.  The arm was missing a good part of the wrist, so I had to rebuild it from clay, and i had to redo the second half due to an undercut i hadn't noticed.  The hand mould was insane.  I sat and stared at it with a pencil for at least an hour, dividing it up, trying to figure out the order in which i could cast it...  to top that off, i only had enough pottery plaster to make the first piece.  i had access to a ton of modeling plaster, so I used that...  that was a treat.  abnormally long setting times occurred from the type of plaster, and it was freezing outside.  That mould is like a puzzle.  the first time I poured it, i was insanely amazed that an actual hand came out...  i had a ton of hands and fingers laying around my space after that.        

shattered anus, sad face

 This was what I had left in the end.  Every single part of it, except the anus, exploded.  I figured I'd keep it and glaze it for practice.  It was a trooper.  haha.
  I wasn't really a super huge fan of the piece as a whole, but yeah, learning is fun like that.  I'd do it again, and I actually want to build another piece with similar qualities.  it should go by a lot faster next time, lol.

Totally Putrid close up.  <3 it!