Assemblage Sculpture

Artist Statement:

Going into this project I had no idea what I wanted to create. I had several different ideas, but none of them really stood out to me and I couldn't visualize my final product. I ended up choosing one design unsurely, but I began to run into a lot of problems so I switched it up. I ended up creating an air plant holder for my Tillandsia capitata. For this piece, I wanted to include a theme of life into it since it is holding my severely damaged air plant that looks lifeless. Overall I am pretty satisfied with this piece, it's semi-practical because I can use it to hold several different plants at a time, and it matches my other room decor.

The materials that I used for this piece were just things around the house. I tried to use a lot of things that would have been thrown away such as the sketch paper that my cats clawed up to stuff the armature and old magazines to cover the piece. I used parts of my wire sculpture from the last project to help create some of the basic shapes for the armature. After I finished the paper mache for my piece I used a but of different odds and ends objects to add different textures and patterns to my piece. I have a bunch of fake ivy plants in my room that tend to lose their leaves so I started collecting them. I knew I wanted to add some color to the piece and wanted it to be in the form of either plants or flowers but didn't know how I was going to do that. My dad actually suggested that I should use beads so that what I ended up doing.

The process for this piece was a bit of an interesting one, especially because I didn't know what I wanted to do most of the time, things just kind of came to me one after another. As you can see in the images above, my sketch looks nothing like my final product. At first, I wanted to create this Tim Burton inspires animal-like sculpture with homemade clay. I did try to make homemade clay but it was very difficult to work with. I ended up deciding to create another idea that I had sketched out before which was a dinosaur plant holder. At first, I wanted to create a much larger sculpture that I could actually plant plants into but ended up not doing that because I would have nowhere for the excess water to drain and didn't want the piece to mold. Eventually, I had the idea to make something a bit smaller that can still accommodate my want for a fun plant holder.