Sustained Investigation #1

This sculpture is a depiction of myself on a dock under a sky full of stars. My guiding question for this sustained investigation is How can I capture moments of facing my fears through sculptures? The overall idea for this piece is that it captures a time when I faced a big fear of mine. I’ve always had a fear of the dark, especially when I’m in unfamiliar places; the moment captured here is when I was up north with a friend on Vinalhaven Island and I wanted to go down to the dock to stargaze. The dock is located down a very long, very dark road. I made the choice to go by myself even though I was scared, knowing that it was an irrational fear. The stars ended up being the most brilliant I had ever seen them. I chose this topic for my sustained investigation because I think that stepping outside comfort zones and facing fears is extremely important for everyone to do. These past couple years I've pushed myself harder than I ever had before and chose to face my fears and insecurities rather than letting them hold me back. I look back on these moments and feel proud of myself because I didn't back down and came out stronger and more confident in myself. Through this investigation I hope to capture 5 of these moments because they are important to me and helped shape who I am today.

To create this sculpture I used a t-shirt, wooden skewers, black paper, white acrylic paint, leaves, clay, and fabric. I used a blue t-shirt for the water because it’s a soft material and water has soft movements, wooden skewers to create the dock because when placed side by side, they resemble planks of wood, black paper and white paint to create the starry night sky because it closely resembles it and I could fold the paper around to create a backdrop, leaves and a rock to convey the idea that the scene is set outdoors, and air-dry clay to mold a little person with paper eyes and a small piece of fabric to serve as clothing/a blanket.

I began with the base of the t-shirt water then cut and aligned the skewers to create the dock. I then folded the black paper to create two “walls” and a “ceiling” of sky, then painted a scatter of white dots to become the stars. I only had one 5x5 in. piece of black paper to work with so I had to fit the rest of the scene into this small box. I molded and placed the figure of me last. Due to limited materials, I felt stuck as the project evolved because if I wanted a full backdrop of stars, I had to downscale everything to make it fit. If I were to do this project again, I would put more effort into detail and find a way to express that I'm depicting a fear being faced rather than just a little person looking at pretty stars. I could do this by playing with space and making the darkness around the person seem more immense.