Perpetual Laugh
For my final studio project, I was interested in challenging myself in ways I’ve never done before. I decided to work on a juvenile lamb that was extremely young. This for me it was something I’ve never done before. A little background knowledge, fully grown animals and young animals are completely different when it comes to their development. Young animals have extremely brittle and fragile bones, while adult animals have heavier and stronger bones. Due to this even though the medium was the same I have never dealt with an animal like this before. I had to do research on how to construct this animal and this was a lot harder than I expected. While doing the research I found out that there are two plates that surround each and every bone, this is called Epiphysis and physis plates this is what dictates bone growth. After the animal has fully grown the bones fuse together. But because of this if the animal is young the bones are still growing and the place has not yet been able to fuse. This means that instead of having the 206 bones that are using work with there’re now 580+ Also needing to mold the lumbar was an overall challenge and I needed to use an artificial clay in order to do make it.
This for me Took a lot of time to better understand how to reconstruct the bone back to its original state. I talk to some of my past mentors such as Yorkshire, “ben” he is the current owner and curator of Yorkshire skeleton museum. He’s a valuable asset that I usually talk to when I am struggling with the build. I had to work with him for a little bit before I understood how to put the plates back together. Also, I went and studied the graphic illustrations of LEE POST, he is another famous articulator in industry, most museum pieces are done by him. Since this is such a closed group it is extremely exclusive and hard to get into. I am now working at an advanced level so just going to YouTube and googling how to do it doesn’t cut it anymore, the only people that will know how to do it properly are the people that are currently working in the field doing it every day. I found that they gave me the best information. When looking at my project as a whole I wanted to make it related to systems and strategies by providing a sculpture that created a commentary on humanity in the world around us. More specifically pouching and the loss of innocent life. And also the killing of animals was the main motive in my project. Furthermore, in the drawing board, I wanted to Study and better understand movement and how the animal naturally moves. So overall I wanted to create a structure that shows movement that alluded to these overarching ideas. Because of this, I focus my research on two things. the first was the technical aspect of how to actually construct the sculpture. And second, was the metaphysical ideas of the sculpture and what I wanted to convey to the audience.
When creating the artwork it was not my standard build I had to wire each individual piece of bone together by drilling it and then running a course wire throw it. This for me was something I never did before and I had to do research on how to construct. While talking to the curator at the museum I learned that in the center of each vertebra there’s a natural Divet and if you put a drill halfway through it and flip it over to the other end and do the same thing, it will perfectly connect and you have a perfect hole right through the center. This came into tell the technical aspects of how to constructed stronger check previously didn’t know. Furthermore, he taught me how to understand witch rib went in what order, this for me with something I struggled in the past with. So there’re a lot of technical feats I had to accomplish in completing the build while doing all this I talk to a bunch of builders in the industry and got tips on how to do this. Overall this Took a lot of time in research to complete.
The next aspect of research for me in completing this project was understanding movement and how movement can be conveyed. Because of this, I looked Bernini as he was incredible in being able to show movement in his sculptures, I tried to understand how he was able to do that and then implemented it into my sculpture.
Studied footage of animals naturally running in nature to better understand how they move, in the art of articulation the slightest discrepancy in the build sticks out like a sore thumb. If the bone does not perfectly lay the way it should it instantly stands out and looks terrible. So I had to understand how to put each piece together seamlessly so they would flow as one consecutive unit. I purchased and studied book called animal anatomy, and looked at muscle development and how animals naturally stay at rest and also how do they are in a dynamic and static movement. This for me influences my decision on how I wanted to pose the sculpture. I am doing up with a very dynamic contorted Pose in which the animal is reaching back and screaming I felt like this showed a lot of movement and overall gave it a dynamic feel.
The sculpture itself is called “perpetual laugh” as the animal will forever be frozen in this position. It almost looks like it’s crying in agony while the Arrows go through it. Overall I decided to keep it very minimalistic trying to stay with modernism keeping it a nice color palette of black and white. The full sculpture has the skull, spine head, and ribs. I was going for the idea that the animal shot and left there. And then over time the arms and legs fell off because of the rota decomposition so all that was left was just a shell of the former body. This for me was a very interesting concept and just how I chose to illustrate. Overall I’m very happy with how the peace turned out
