After that there was lots of information about choosing and using various types of wood - things I didn't learn at my father's knee (he was building houses after all, not making sculpture).The 5-minute talk was on Bruce Nauman, born 1941, American, trained as a painter - who had the great realisation, "whatever I do in my studio is art" - and proceeded to do things that required complex thinking and simple execution. He often used sound and text - eg in his neon signs, and in an empty, dimly lit room full of whispers. Is looking at how words fill space a form of sculpture?
Here's one of his early neon works - "the true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths"
and here's "15 pairs of hands" - it was interesting to realise that the plinths would have to be metal, and weighted, to support the cast bronze -
Then, to work on our "outdoor project" - I'm still changing mine. I'd brought in some samples of handmade paper joined with microtags
and other more ambitious shapes and sizes, waxed for durability and luminosity -
all working towards the idea of a "house on stilts" - I'm still obsessed by the idea of using non-alphabetic languages, and ladders, but had a little sidetracking into houses on stilts (and igloos!) being places of safety as well as places to meet and communicate
While building a couple of examples, I came up with various things that might be used as legs - pencils, saw blades, paintbrushes, drinking straws, nails, plastic flowers (eg long stemmed roses) - and started thinking about how the qualities of materials, such as the bendiness of tracing paper that's been rolled up, might be used -
Here's the latest development -
But this one (which I prepared earlier) is something to work on another time -
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