Hands Sculpture

This assignment was a challenge for me. Not only did I struggle with coming up with a concept, but once I began to carve, my imagination took me to a different place entirely. In addition to that, I wanted to try to create a piece with some sort of message behind it, or at least attempt at creating a piece that told a story. Hungry is supposed to show the rapid decline of someone who is starving, as both hands, cupped together, reach out as if to ask for an offering. The right hand, which is a light blue, is nowhere near as emaciated as the skeletal left one, yet the carvings on the back suggest scars, or skin pulled tight over a web of veins. The blue also suggest that the coldness, as if these are the hands of someone both starving and freezing. The meaning of the right hand is a little more clear, the skeletal hand suggests someone who has starved to death. In this way this piece is chronological, the story of someone begging for food, not receiving any, and rapidly declining until they die.

To create this piece I first made a mold of my hands using alginate, and then, without spilling any plaster at all, I made a plaster cast of my hands. Then I used clay sgraffito and carving tools to carve my hands. Next, I painted them using acrylic paints mixed with water. Throughout this piece I made several revisions, and at one point the entire right hand was painted red and the entire left hand was painted solid blue. I decided I did not like the way this looked, and realized it didn't tell a story the way I wanted it to, so I rashly decided to spray paint over the entire cast and start again fresh. This only lead to headaches once I began to carve away the plaster to make the right hand look like bones, as the spray paint created a smooth coating that was tough to carve into.

While I may have touched on this in previous paragraphs, I set out in this assignment to create a piece that told a story, even if I was the only one that understood it. As a result of this, I was constantly displeased with the way the piece looked, and even made poor artistic decisions, such as spray painting the entire thing when I was unhappy with how one hand looked. Reflecting upon it now, if I had taken time to think about each step from the beginning, I would have made a better piece of art.