Sustained Investigation #2

The Quarry Wall is a representation of my friends and I cliff jumping at a quarry last summer. They had all jumped right in the water but I remained at the top of the wall way too scared to jump off of it. Falling is a big fear of mine so I was not crazy about throwing myself into the water from 20 feet up; I did not face this fear right away, infact, it took me until the next day to build up enough courage to do so. Upon returning, I allowed myself only a moment's hesitation before leaping off the wall with a running start: so. much. fun. I chose to depict this for my second sculpture because through this experience I was reminded that I shouldn't let fears such as this one hold me back from experiencing new feelings and making memories.

This sculpture was made using the lid of a plastic container for the base/water, Crayola air-dry clay to form the wall, acrylic paint to add color, plants for scenery, and Elmer's glue. I used salt dough for the people because the Crayola clay ran out, but next time I would use a different substitute because this dough was too soft and didn't hold it's form.

I began with the water to create a base to build up from. I used different colors and shades of blue paint to create shadows and highlights that allude to the movement of water. Creating the effect of water was the most difficult and time-consuming step of this process because water is always changing its form and it has different patterns and movements. I first tested painting a small area with swirls of glue to imitate ripples of water, but it spread out and dried clear. I then tried using saran wrap stretched over the plastic lid to create the texture of water, but it didn't turn out so I resorted to painting, which took a lot of time itself because I wanted to get the dark and light contrasts just right to suggest movement and depth. My next challenge was creating the illusion that the wall was larger-than-life because I wanted the sculpture to convey meaning without explanation, but I had a limited amount of clay to do so; I worked with what I had after concluding that I would just make the people smaller to add emphasis to the size of the wall. I molded the clay to give it texture similar to that of rock and used color to enhance the effect. Now that the structure of the sculpture was complete, I moved on to forming myself and my friends out of the salt dough; once dry, I added detail with paint. For final touches, I attached leaves to add to the scenery and glued everything into place. If I were to continue this project I would swap out the salt dough people for those made from a better clay and add more of a background behind and to the sides of the wall.