Advanced Sculpture, 2014

Project 1: Process

In this piece of work I choose to capitalize my material of crayons and how they melt, become a liquid, run, cool and then become a solid again. In order for this process to happen I had to understand how my material acted naturally and when the material was in control and when I was in control.
           
            The act of melting and pouring the liquid wax and allowing it to flow naturally was a very time consuming process.  Much like Jackson Pollock, who pours is paints on to a canvas, I allowed the wax to flow but not into a mess blob of wax rather like Lynda Benglis I wanted to learn what my material does and not attempting to express anything but the process.  By creating first a mold for the wax to pour over with plain ‘white’ wax I was able to achieve a three- dimensional object that I could peel the wax away from to act as my skeleton or support for the structure. Using this skeleton I poured colored wax using primary colors; red, blue and yellow. I chose to use primary colors to capture the runs and the movement of the wax highlighting its process. Although I did consider not using color, which would allow you just to see form, like Richard Serra who believed color takes away form the action verb. He wanted to get down to the basics with no symbolism and striped it down. Over all the colors represent nothing and simply are there to help distinguish the pours I also decided to place my work on the wall that is held up by a shelf made by plexiglass. I found this appropriate because I wanted it to seem like it was floating and defying gravity apposed to a stable fixture.  Placing it on the wall also allowed me to create drips that flowed down the wall that made it seem like the wax was still in action.
           

My over feeling with this piece is at a love/hate relationship. In understanding how process-oriented art works I naturally had to give up the control freak mentality and try not to be so anal retentive about everything.  Process is not about the final pretty perfect product.  I feel that if I had more time I would have liked have really experiment more with the wax since melting, and cooling took a long time and required for me to create the whole thing in one sitting.  Another issue of mine was whether to include the crayons so that the audience knew that the structure was indeed make from them or to just leave it out entirely and to just use them for their pigments.  Crayons themselves represent childhood and imagination, which was something that I think being process-oriented, should not be included at all. Also after discussion with my collages I do think that my shelf is a bit of an eyesore.  If I was doing this again I would try to create something else or maybe just not have the shelf at all since the planes that it creates clashes with the planes I created in the wax.  Another possibility would be to show how the wax drips, puddles and falls in three separate works. To obtain each of these would be a different process but it would also show