Starting totems
11.10.23
The first totem was round, squat figures. These require a lot of hollowing out and present a lot of challenges when joining. Plus I tried to get the hands working, but got quite carried away with the ability to produce ‘clothing’ from ‘slabs’ of clay. In the end the hands were totally lost in the design. I did learn
1) that you can get a really interesting join/crease by allowing a joined slab to overlap itself
2) you can get nice intentional palm prints on a ball as you can slap it quite hard. This is nice to preserve as it rewards close observation and also is a clear hand trace
12.10.23
The second totem is built in planes/cardinal directions/oblongs. It allows a high degree of abstraction meaning there’s only hands and totems
1) it could be abstracted further into just squares on blocks
2) scoring for slip creates a an interesting incision which could be built on
3) next time if the bodies are built from slabs this would allow them to have a smooth inside and prevent the need for leather-drying and hollowing. I could also allow the join to be seen as this would give visual interest to the back. It could even allow viewing in which is ‘anti-totem’
4) a design problem was posed by the pointing fingers. In the end the hand was divided into planes but they are mirrored on the z and x axis (not just one, like, the finger is ‘surface plane’ on one hand and ‘second plane’ on the second hand)
5) the strange arm was resolved with a sculptural/ceramic idea of the curved arm
Research: I asked around the faculty for gestures. Blythe had a lot to say about why we should use metric but accidentally gave away three. Leah thought of two very intentionally then stopped, and both involved movement. (student) gave me a one-hnaded gesture for height and then stopped.
one-fingered gesture, ha.
These are descriptive gestures?
A monumental gesture
Could the be built modularly, in theory be a restack-able monument? Or a monument that can be taken down and re-arranged? Isn’t that cool in the era of statue toppling like yes you can change it, you can take it away from verticality, but it also has this idea of no-obselencse built in, a slightly conservative principle. Cool contradictions.
And if they were built at scale? If they were foam and the back was a contrivance? if you could go inside, what would be inside? human scale? child scale? crawling scale?