Sculpture Work

I know this blog is supposed to be about my senior studio, but I've been working hard on a bar table and floating platform bed project, and don't have enough to show yet to warrant a full blog post. Instead, I'll talk about a transformative experience I had last year that really made me want to pursue the visual arts program as a second major. I took Sculpture and Installation with Nanette Yannuzzi-Macias, and it was the first time I really fully explored and experimented with various materials on a large scale. I was convinced going into the class I'd have to work small, and wracked my brain to figure out how to answer prompts because I had no money to invest into the course. Nanette convinced me that I could make a compelling sculptural piece with cardboard. Well, she told me that, and then showed me many incredible examples, but I still didn't think I could pull it off. See, I had no faith in myself as an artist. Up until this point, I had just experimented with various mediums in high school.

At Buxton, I fell in love with tinkering and throwing different mediums together and seeing what happened, like pottery and oil paint on a canvas. I also spray painted the walls of my mom's garage to let out all the feelings I had pent up about transitioning to college. Then I got to Oberlin and spent two years studying education, barely making any art at all. Then this mural contest came up, and the Latinx Community Coordinator at the Multi-cultural resource center pushed me to apply. I submitted a quick sketch I made that evening, and to my surprise, I won! That started me down the long road of becoming an artist at Oberlin. I realized I needed art to be able to process my thoughts and emotions, and to express myself in a language that made sense without thinking too deep before hand. The moment I got back on campus in August, 2016, I quickly realized I needed art if I was to finish my degree at Oberlin. Working with Nanette, I learned how to take that chaotic outlet, and express it with more professional techniques. That mural project was the first of many long overdue projects that I thought would be finished much sooner. Alongside painting the mural, Nanette urged me to take her sculpture course. Two of the results of this course are pictured above. I had no idea how much I was getting into, or how intensive these courses would be. The class description said two class times, 3 hours on 2 days a week.

That didn't seem like much to me at first, until I started easily spending an extra 5-10 hours on the mural per week, plus at least 5 or 6 hours extra outside of class on the sculpture projects. I practically lived in the sculpture room, doing all my work there in between painting the mural and building something random with cardboard.  At first, I just started playing with the material, seeing how elaborate of a structure I could cut into the cardboard, and then how crazy I could get it standing up on its own. Playing with the material inspired me to kind of dance with it, feel out the material and then paint on it what it showed me back. The structure you see above is a culmination of my two main projects in the course for the Art Walk show, and the structure originally stood up entirely on its own. I added hot glue to the joints to stabilize it in order to move it. Once I finished the structure, it felt like a shrine that needed to be entered, experienced. It's not pictured here because I had a hard time photographing the experience, similar to a childhood box fort I ended up building the next semester. I took large sheets of brown construction paper, and hung it from the ceiling, constructing a maze with more red symbols and paintings as viewers navigated through the space to find the altar in the middle.

Later in the semester, I stuck with the altar idea when we had to cast a mold out of an object. The prompt was multiples. We were tasked with casting something over and over again out of plaster to create a sculptural piece or installation. I decided to start by experimenting with puzzle pieces, since in high school I had a series of realizations that ended with me deeply identifying puzzle pieces with my shards of memory and soul. I fell in love with the repetitive process of creating a rubber mold, then mixing and pouring plaster into it to create infinite replicas. I ended up making two sheets of 4x6 puzzle pieces, resulting in 48 pieces per batch. I went overboard with the creation, making almost 1,000 puzzle pieces before realizing I needed to figure out what I was doing with them before the deadline. I kept imagining the hanging in the air, but had pretty much nothing else in the ways of a final idea. That's when the altar came back to me. I dreamed of my grand mother, and really missed her one day, since she's all the way in Salvador Brasil and I spend most of my time in the U.S. I decided I was going to make an altar to her and my memory of her, with physical manifestations of my memories hanging all around. I bought candles that reminded me of her scent and her apartment, and I hung up the pieces on invisible plastic wire all around it. Again, the full project isn't pictured, but beyond the red altar above is 986 white, black, and red puzzle pieces scattered around my grandmothers altar, some alone, some connected, and some in big heaps representing how I remember things, how deeply they resonate with me, and how often my memories feels split and lost to time.

This semester ended up being the first time I got deeply introspective with my art. I put a lot of myself in perspective through these sculptures, and reflected heavily on my life and experiences thus far. The whole time, I was also being pushed into new territory by painting a mural professionally, from building the wooden frame itself, to applying sealant, gesso, and mixing the acrylic paints together to match the colors more faithfully to the flags and the interwoven feeling I wanted to express. This parallel journey of exploring myself and my physical abilities through art really made me feel like an artist for the first time ever. I have Nanette to thank for a wonderful semester, and now back in the present for pushing me even further during the beginning of the Senior Studio course.