#2 Woken Walter

Woken Walter was the second project under my concentration. He is constructed of sculpty, foam board, paper, acrylic paint, some silky type fabric, and some stuffing. The project is held together with super glue, Tacky glue and hot glue (lots of glue). The sculpture is of an older man with a "flesh", one that's not decided. The rest of the body is only bones. I made all 33 vertebra, 24 ribs, and every other bone in the body (excluding the ones in his head), a total of 184. Since the bones were so tiny and fragile a few were lost in transport, like one whole foot. I also sacrificed a few bones, mainly ribs, when displaying the body in the coffin in attempt to make it look less crowded. The "body" is placed in a black coffin with a cross on the lid and a padded inside. I put the cross on the coffin because I find that most religious people have a cross somewhere on or near their coffin, and I personally believe that religion or Christianity is fairly popular with older folks. I placed the coffin in a grassy pack to represent a few things, one, to give the sense of being forgotten, like the people just him in the middle of nowhere and forgot to bury him. The second reason is to give the sense of peace, which can be confusing considering he was forgotten, but I was thinking more finding peace in being forgotten.

Some things that I struggle with were making everything portion-it to the head. I originally was going to place Walter in a rocking chair but the chair was barely bigger than the head. Placing the silk inside the box neatly and puffy like in real coffins was more than frustrating. At first, I used super glue, but that soaked through the fabric leaving stains which looked bad, so there are a few spots like that that I couldn't fix. I finally realized that tacky glue works and wouldn't leave marks, however, it took forever to dry and I had to do each induvial bone at a time, holding them still, so they could be standing up without falling.

Overall I'm very happy with how the piece came out even though it was a very tedious process. My favorite part is the old man's head because I think it came better than I originally believed. I also really love how thick and colorful the grass ended up being.