Yr 1 Summer term session 1 Sculpture

ARGH this started off well and then went straight down hill. I am a little ambivalent about sculpture - there is some I love but I find I do not connect so excitedly with much of it. It's more appealing to me if it's collaged cleverly of found materials, or if it's well-executed figuratively; or anything but big blobs of idiotic bullshit! Sorry to speak harshly but really, by the end of this lesson that's what it appeared is the aim of the next 3 weeks. Alex Harley seems like a nice enough teacher , her sculpture (wood, stone, paper) obviously highly regarded.. but by the time we moved on to clay in the afternoon I was getting pretty pissed off. I just didn't get it. Whatever I made, trying to work guided by the drawings focused on movement in our body that morning, was for her too "linear". .?? My drawings were pretty linear. I was trying to depict the feeling of doing a cartwheel.

Note that we are not supposed to be depicting anything figurative, ie a person, or a body part, or even an entire moment but a "cross-section" of that movement, a moment in time, perhaps. All about how the movement FEELS not how it looks. Abstracted.

Ok, but...

Drawings were ok but after a while I lost inspiration and got a bit bored. By lunch I wasn't interested in taking these particular drawings further into clay, but thought maybe clay would open up a new bunch of inspiration and opportunities. Unfortunately, it didn't. It pissed me off severely and put me into a baaaad mood. It felt clumsy, irritating and any shape I tried to form just broke. It is solid, blocky, and dense and my aesthetic leans more towards airy tangled, delicate, intricate. I wouldn't mind trying something delicate and intricate in clay but we are not taught any techniques or tricks with which to manipulate the clay, nor do we have enough time to produce anything of worth in my opinion. We're supposed to make maquettes for next week to move into wood carving from a block, a reductive technique my heart rather sinks at. The more airy and delicate you like it the more carving there is to do. UGH.

Alex the teacher is getting us to work along the same lines as her own work, but I don't think they are the right lines for ME. Maybe our aesthetics are opposed. I don't mind her work, but I don't feel like spending the next 3 weeks trying to do what she does..something my classmates seemed to do quite successfully. (Of course I wouldn't wish to denigrate my classmates' efforts, they were all very productive, and some appealed to me, but I just could not 'get' why their "blobs" appealed to Alex more than mine did!! Why were mine seemingly labelled "failures"?? am confounded. )

So what to do?? Make an animation of my failures? Use my time elsewhere? Attempt sculptures from other materials, on my own? I have a plastic extrusion pen ! use that? My dissolvable fabric?

Really feel a bit at sea and I hate this feeling. I wanted it all to continue previous themes too. But totally stuck, and not interested in moving forward in the way that has been prescribed to me. Annoyed about all the time that will be wasted.

The thing is, I rather liked these efforts before the teacher came along and told me they were wrong. Even if there is no right or wrong in art, I felt completely undermined and lacking in confidence after that. Remind me not to do that to anyone in the future!