Respond & Confront

For this assignment, we were asked to create a sculpture that responded and confronted an issue important to us. Addition criteria included a required human appendage and text. For my piece, I decided to confront mental illness and the stigmas/stereotypes around them.

I started by making a simple head form using pinch pots. I started with the chest, then added a coil neck, and built the head using two pinch pots on top of each other. I used my fingers inside the head before adding the second pinch pot to create the eye sockets, lips, and nose. Once I was happy with the facial features, I added the second pinch pot the smoothed the top. Lastly, to represent the mental illness, I made four small pinch pot and added little facial features to the front and attached them around the head.

When the form was mostly dry, I painted three coats of black underglaze onto the form, but didn't coat the small heads. After that was dry, I used a scratching tool to sgraffito words that represented mental illness stereotypes, like "crazy" and "psycho".

After the bisque fire, I put three coats of clear glaze onto the head, again avoiding the small heads, leaving them white. Overall, I am extremely happy with my respond and confront project. I think it did a good job representing my issue and it was out-of-the-box for my artistic style.