Contextual Studies 2 Integrated Project

Module Content

This module is largely self-directed since it is primarily focused on you developing your personal practice. You will be required to identify a suitable area of investigation, to produce a body of research exploring this theme and develop this into artwork. An important element in developing and understanding your personal practice is to decide and articulate where it sits within a broader contemporary and historical art and cultural context. The final aim of this module is to explore different forms of presenting your practice. This module can be a self-contained project but frequently it converges with the development of one of the other modules (2D or 3/4D studies).

Developing my personal practice

I have chosen to focus on sculpture and physical construction to develop my practice as an artist, below is some of the research I have gathered so far.

Anish Kapoor

Anish & The Turner Prize

In 1991 he was awarded the Turner Prize for his sandstone and pigment work Untitled - famously becoming one of the few Turner Prize winners to be awarded the prize when already a successful artist, chairman of the Tuner Prize said the competition was tough but “ Kapoor was the natural winner”

Early Life & Awards

Anish Kapoor was born in Bombay but studied and lived in London since the early 1970’s, he studied at Hornsey college of art and later at the Chelsea School of Art and Design, he has won various awards for his art such as Premio Duemila Prize while representing Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1990, back in 1991 he won the turner prize and then in 2002 received the Unilever Commission for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern 

Past Exhibitions

Notable places that he as exhibited are at places such as Rockefeller Centre in New York in 2006, Kensington Gardens London in 2010, He also exhibited at the Grand Palaise in Paris in 2011.

His visit to India was the catalyst to his success, at that point his work became abstract, using colour pigment, Anish’s early work, used exotic shapes bright pigment colour, material and colour are one thing as seen below.

Anish Kapoor became known in the 1980s for his geometric or biomorphic sculptures made using simple materials such as granite, limestone, marble, plaster. These early sculptures are frequently simple curved forms, usually monochromatic and brightly coloured using powder pigment to define and permeate the form. “  while making the pigment pieces, it occurred to me that they all form themselves out of each other, so he decided to give them a generic title, a thousand names, implying infinity, a thousand being a symbolic number.

Commissions 

ArcelorMittal Orbit was commissioned as a permanent artwork for Londons Olympic Park and was completed in 2012. 

Here are some of  his designs and drawings for the ArcelorMittal Orbit

“There is a kind of medieval sense to it of reaching up to the sky, building the impossible. A procession, if you like. It's a long winding spiral: a folly that aspires to go even above the clouds and has something mythic about it.” — Anish Kapoor

The ArcelorMittal Orbit is a 114.5 meter (376 feet) tall sculpture and observation tower in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford London. It is Britain's largest piece of public art, and is intended to be a permanent lasting legacy of London's hosting of the 2012 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games, assisting in the post-Olympics regeneration of the Stratford area. Sited between the Olympic Stadium and the Aquatics Centre, it allows visitors to view the whole Olympic park from two observation platforms The project was expected to cost £19.1 million, with £16 million coming from Britain's richest man, the steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal, chairman of the ArcelorMittal steel company, and the balance of 3.1million coming from the London Development agency.

Commission 2

•The Unilever Series of commissions for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, titled ,Marsyas

He explored what he sees as deep-rooted metaphysical polarities: presence and absence, being and non-being, place and non-place and the solid and the intangible.

This work when finished  and exhibited was seen by 1.8million people

Commission 3

Memory (2008) is a site-specific work that was conceived to engage two different exhibition locations at the Guggenheim museums in Berlin and New York. Utilizing Cor-Ten steel for the first time, the sculpture represents a milestone in Kapoor’s career. Memory's thin steel skin, only eight millimeters thick, suggests a form that is ephemeral and unmonumental. The sculpture appears to defy gravity as it gently glances against the periphery of the gallery walls and ceiling. However, as a 24-ton volume, Memory is also raw, industrial, and foreboding. Positioned tightly within the gallery, Memory is never fully visible; instead the work fractures and divides the gallery into several distinct viewing areas. The division compels visitors to navigate the museum, searching for vantage points that offer only glimpses of the sculpture. This processional method of viewing Memory is an intrinsic aspect of the work. Visitors are asked to contemplate the ensuing fragmentation by attempting to piece together images retained in their minds, exerting effort in the act of seeing—a process Kapoor describes as creating a “mental sculpture.”

Cloud Gate, Chicago

Cloud Gate is a public sculpture, that is the centerpiece of AT&T Plaza at Millennium Park in the loop community area of Chicago Illinois. Constructed between 2004 and 2006, the sculpture is nicknamed The Bean because of its shape, It is made up of 168 stainless steel plates welded together, it has a highly polished exterior which has no visible seams and measures at 33 by 66 by 42 feet (10 x20 x13m) and weighs 110 tons, he says it was inspired by liquid mercury.

Interesting Quotes by Anish Kapoor

“Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies”.

“Being an artist is a very long game. It is not a 10-year game. I hope I'll be around making art when I'm 80”.

“What one does in the studio is to pose a series of problems to oneself. I've got to look for some deeper meaning, for some reason for this thing to be in the world. There's enough stuff in the world”.

“We live in a fractured world. I've always seen it as my role as an artist to attempt to make wholeness”.

“Sculpture occupies the same space as your body”.

“Much of what I make is geometric, and has a kind of almost mathematical logic to the form”.

“The idea is that the object has a language unto itself”.

“That freedom that Picasso afforded himself, to be an artist in a huge number of ways, seems to be a huge psychological liberation”.

“Is it my role as an artist to say something, to express, to be expressive? I think it's my role as an artist to bring to expression, it's not my role to be expressive”.

“I've always felt that if one was going to take seriously this vocation as an artist, you have to get beyond that decorative facade”.

“The eye is a very quick instrument, much quicker than the ear. The eye gets it immediately”.

“I think I understand something about space. I think the job of a sculptor is spatial as much as it is to do with form”.

Having initially started to look at Anish's work purely from its visual impact in shapes mirrored in shiny surfaces and the sheer scale of the works had started to interest me, not just the scale but the need to be physically installed into the landscape and the impact  to the locations and public interface, this led me to start looking at other artists connected to public artworks.

Eduardo Paolozzi 

Eduardo Paolozzi was born on March 7, 1924, in Edinburgh, Scotland. In the 40s and '50s, he made sculptures and collages that combined surrealism with pop culture and modern machinery. In the 60s, he further incorporated machinery into his art. He spent the 70s working on abstract art reliefs. Throughout the 80s and '90s, he took public commissions. 

Having being impressed with much of his work I found myself intrigued with the heads and the processes of his plaster castings/ 3 dimensional collages and reconfigurations

Primary Research

Public sculpture I have spotted myself while out and about

I started to conduct some experiments for plaster, my first step was to create a simple figure from clay to make a mould for plaster casts, here is a picture of the clay model 

Once the clay model has dried I constructed a wooden box to place the model and pour the melted rubber into the box to create a mould, see the picture below of the box that contained the mould and can continue to support the mould when recasting

I used this process to produce several reproductions of the the model in plaster as seen below

I then decided to continue my process by dissecting my figures into pieces and repositioning and modifying there form here are some of my results

I liked some of the aspects of these pieces and decided to continue the process by modifying a dissected section of the figure by removing the top and inner section of the head as seen below

Unhappy with the fact that the cut across the head was not level to the base cut i decided to re-level the base by wrapping tinfoil around the neck covering the shoulders in a funnel type shape securing the tinfoil around the neck with an elastic band and placing the head upside down upon the top cut and pouring more plaster into the tinfoil cone secured around the neck allowing the liquid the find the level of the base levelling up the cuts and extending the upper body section, this improvised use of a tinfoil and the crinkled surface texture being mirrored in the cast, this interested me.

I continued to experiment withe resulting cast having recently being inspired from reading the Futurist Sculpture Manifesto, as seen below in the link

lhttp://www.unknown.nu/futurism/techsculpt.html

Here are some pictures of my results from being inspired by Futurism

These pieces are cast from another mould of a previous assembly

This is a casting that I broke when removing the mould and splatted with left over plaster just prior to drying, in a poor attempt to cover the damaged section, not what i intended but decided to keep the cast anyway as viewed from one angle did still resemble flaming type hair from the top of the head, I decided to take some photos and drag them into photoshop to have a play with effects.

This is the results from photoshop

This picture above suggests a much more carefully crafted subject than the source material

This picture above did not strike me at all initially however when subjected to effects in photoshop it suddenly suggested the presence of a figure sitting on a rock like head form stirring away like an astral version of the thinking man by Rodin, what a wicked accident.

This picture above was my second best image from my photoshop experiments.

After I finished the heads I decided I wanted to experiment with the textures on plaster, this piece below is cast of crinkled tinfoil 

The randomly textured surface of this piece of plaster above inspired me to experiment further with this idea of using textures 

I decided to continue by applying this idea to a previous wire model of free falling man, as seen below

I decided to re-model it slightly and altering the shape of the legs and the position of the arms so that it stood in a standing position, I then led it on its back and crinkled and cupped the back in the foil and then mixed and poured plaster through the wire and allowed it to collect in the foil, once it started to dry i removed the foil before drying completely and chipped any unwanted excess away and allows to dry properly. At this point I did not know weather the plater would crack or not, after it had dried completely I noticed it had not cracked at all like I thought it might

Having studied my results I decided I liked the imperfect coverage and texture and decided it could possibly be improved through applying a paint finish, I then decided to spray paint the figure with matt black paint

Once I had completed the black

I then decided to highlight the raised surface of the figure by applying silver paint to a stiff rag and wiping over the figure so that the silver paint highlighted the texture seen in the photos below

These images show my results of an experiment in applying a random plaster finish to the wire figure which in my opinion has effectively added flash to the bones successfully.

Whilst out and about I came across a small brass sheet that appears to be stamped out with a pattern that almost looks like ornate windows as seen below

I then decided to see if I could press the patterned sheet into clay and produce plaster copies 

I placed the cotton bud on the plaster reproduction in this photograph above just to show scale

I then burnt the surface of the pieces covering it in sut and rubbed the surface to create highlights that depicted the pressed pattern, I then decided to cut and remodel the casts and take some studio photographs, here are my results 

I was very pleased with the studio photographs of my results and intend to continue with the idea of remodelling the flat slabs in various geometric designs and develop the idea further   

 Working with Plaster

I much enjoyed experimenting with the possibilities of a material that I have not explored before,I intend to continue to explore the possibilities further, I have been particularly pleased with the experimentation of mixing the medium with other materials like the wire figure shown earlier in this blogpost.

Having had good results mixing the plaster and wire model I decided to introduce some foraged sticks, twigs and leaves into a composition incorporating with another head cast on a mother nature theme, here are some studio shots I took after I had finished

I decided to paint the cast to disguise the points of transition from plaster to twigs, I did this cast and another at the same time to use excess plaster mix i had judged incorrectly, as seen below