Advanced Sculpture, 2014

Project 2: Place

Intention Statement: Place

For my final project, I decided to explore the idea of place differently than in my quickfire and make the project more about my relationship with that place, rather than about the physical aspect of the area. With this idea in mind I created three pieces of work, constructed with found objects that resided on St. Mary’s campus. To separate myself from Goldsworthy’s work I broke away from the idea of only using natural objects and included all found objects.

In the first piece that I created I used pieces of broken glass on the St. Mary’s track. How the actions of others have impacted this environment affects me negatively. This one work of art was my reaction to what others do in relation to this specific location on campus. I wanted to take what I felt were negative actions performed in that location and create a reactionary response through the medium of art, to send a message and bring awareness. This idea of reacting to what I felt was something negative and flipping it into something positive through art, was a concept that I carried throughout my other two pieces in this series.

The second piece that I created was made with discarded cigarettes and ash. The St. Mary’s campus is known to be a very heavy smoking campus. With every step one takes in this environment, there are discarded cigarettes littering the grass and sidewalks. I wanted to do a reactionary piece to the idea of how much students smoke and discard their cigarette litter within the environment that they and other students walk every day. The location I picked for this presentation was a discarded ash pile by the townhouses in north campus. I incorporated two elements which relate to each other physically, ash being what cigarettes leave behind, and also gave the piece a pedestal to be more pronounced to the audience. I again, as in my first piece, created an organic shape that cannot be mistaken for anything other than manmade. I made the climax of the piece at the end of the ash pile by mounting a discarded cigarette carton to show the relationship between where cigarettes come from and what they become.

My third piece was one that was both time specific and location oriented. I created my last piece on a Saturday morning after students drank on Friday night. I collected and created an organic shape with liquor bottles/beer cans. I decided to mount this work by the pub where students openly drink alcohol.  This is also a very public and open place for the art to be viewed. I wanted to create a reactionary piece about the disrespect that students show their environment, having little desire to take responsibility and clean it up. I created an organic shape to relate my work back to my other creations, but also, as in my other pieces, made the design seem human made and intentional.

When looking back over my project, I feel that I created my work with a strong sense of place because I have a connection, a relationship, and I created a direct response to that location. These places and the actions taking place within these locations, have direct meaning and influence to me as a member of the St. Mary’s community. Using only found objects from each place only makes the artwork stronger, because it emphasizes each location.  The objects have a relationship with the people in that place, the environment and now the artwork within that space. As a personal critique of my work I feel that I have captured the idea of place conceptually, but did struggle with finding a way of expressing my ideas through the artwork. I wish I could have thought more about how to use the objects and form to express my ideas and frustrations more effectively.  I do hope that my artwork expressed a message to those who viewed it.