Plaster Hand Sculpture

We started this project by mixing alginate and casting our hands in it. After that, we were meant to use the casting of our hand to create a sculpture that expressed something about us, or something we were passionate about. After that, we made sketches of way that we could turn the cast hands into something other than the shape that the were already in. I was presented with an interesting challenge: all of the fingers on my plaster hand fell off. I decided that since the hand fell apart, I could make a landscape where the "ruins" of the hand would be surrounded by ruined buildings and torn paper. The palm of the hand was glued to like it is descending or sinking into the ground, and the fingers are either coming out of the ground or strewn about on the floor. I took a block of plaster and carved crumbling walls and a brick pattern. I then painted the panel black, made drawings of marble sculptures that I saw in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and wrote down fragments of Sappho poems, then on tore up those drawings and glued them down to the panel. At the last minute, I tried to make a reduction sculpture like the ones I had sketched, so I watched a video about making a marble reduction, and then set to work with another block of plaster.

This sculpture is very unified and engages the space with its monochromatic color scheme and use of positive and negative space. For once, I didn't "go with the flow" and I had a clear plan of what I wanted to for this sculpture, and how I wanted to do it. I changed what I wanted to make the ground look like (originally it was going to be white) because I wanted there to be a more full range of value.

This project has many elements that the viewer could interpret in different ways: the Sappho poems, the 2D and 3D theme of sculptures, the crumbling hand and building. I incorporated these elements because I either thought that they were interesting, or I liked them. I wouldn't change very much about this project, except that I might make the hand and torso look more crumbled, and I might make it taller since much of the sculpture is very low to the ground/panel.