Sustained Investigation #1

Horse

4x4

clay

This is my first Sustained Investigation, my inquiry questions is 'How can I use animals to explore movement/motion in my sculpture and painting'. I wanted to use clay for this project because it is something that I have been playing around with over the summer and figured it would be an interesting way to try and show movement using an animal body. At this point my project is still incomplete, for it to be complete I still need to glaze and fire which. For this project the animal that I wanted to focus on was a horse, I want to focus on the idea of power that horses have dwelling inside so I decided to do a horse rearing.

I began this project with just a block of clay and began to shape it down and mold it into into the horse shape. Once I had the basic shape created I moved on to adding the detail of the face. I molded ears and I wanted to get some definition in the nose as well, this I struggled with because I didn't have the tools to get in and work on such a small scale. I also wanted to make the mouth stick out, this ended up falling off at first and I struggled to make the small details fit together. Next I moved onto working on the legs, I wanted to try and show the power by making the flexed muscles show, this didn't really work. I think that I started out with too wet clay which made everything mush together. But I did get some definition. I struggled with making the horse stand up too, as it was very top heavy so I added the second leg to give it a little more support. I didn't want to add a mane to the horse because I didn't want it to take away from the idea of movement in the horses body.

I think that this was a good first attempt at working with clay and trying to make it fit my inquiry question, I do need to finish it and add glaze to make it fully complete but I like what I have come up with so far. I think that I need to go back and make the muscles more defined so I can push the idea of movement while keeping my original idea. I think that if I were to do this again I wouldn't start with one big block of clay, I think that I would start with a pinch pot and work my way up to the shape rather than working down.