Assemblage Sculpture

Artist Statement

For this assignment, my subject was a squid - the same one used in my sgraffito tile. The materials I used for it were cardboard, paper, masking tape, magazine/newspaper pieces that I cut out, and leftover tissue paper. I started this project by crumpling up some paper to resemble the shape of the top of a squid, then wrapped tape around it to further achieve the shape, as well as hold the paper together. Once I was satisfied with this, I cut out pieces of cardboard for the fins at the top of the squid's head and hot glued them on. I then tried to make its head out of another piece of paper, as shown in my third idea generation sketch, but it was taking too long, and I thought the squid would look fine without it, so I moved on to the tentacles. At this point, I was working on this at home, which was a little more difficult as I did not have a ton of materials, but I then found some leftover tissue paper from birthdays, Christmas, etc., so I decided to use that. I thought it would take a lot more effort to get the tentacles to hold their shape, but to my surprise, they remained the same after I only twisted them, so I then proceeded to glue them onto the base of the squid using hot glue. I then cut out some pieces from old magazines that I could use to color the squid, however, before I glued them I made sure to cut off any loose pieces of tape that may have not stuck well, and loose strings of hot glue, as well as some dried hot glue chunks. Once I did this, I began dipping the cut out pieces of magazine into my glue/water mixture and placing them onto the squid. I had wanted to make a sort of gradient on the squid, with the middle being the darkest, and the sides being the lightest, but that did not end up happening.