Saturday, January 17, 2009

Getting Sculptural

As promised, I started looking at the gesture form as a sculptural object. Here was my first attempt at the idea of two intertwining gestures, three-dimensionally. I used some thin aluminum tubing as the frames, and black masking tape to form the undulating plane betwixt them. There are two things that I learned while doing this piece:

1. By forming a gesture out of a malleable piece of tubing, without guide or preliminary spontaneity, it ceases to be gestural. Sure, its curvy and sort of suggests a swooping gesture, but it is not pure in its nature. I am not exactly sure how I can make something volumetric that reads as a gesture. This is something that I have also had to deal with architecturally. How does one keep the gesture pure and keep it grounded in reality, that is to say the physical existence as opposed to a theoretical one. Which brings me to...

2. It is very easy, even starting with two relatively uncomplicated "gestures" and intertwining them, for the shape to become a physical impossibility. My original intention was to divide up the segments into equal segments and then connect those points with its equivalent on the opposing segment, thus generating form. Again, this was not easily done, and I think that I eventually had to cheat and break that rule to get the form to work. This was acceptable as it gave me a physical way of dealing with a partially non-physical problem...





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