To help better understand my work, I have decided to look at these clay sculptures from when I first started to make them, and why they have stayed with me and I continue to make them three years on. I often leave ideas behind once I feel that I have gained all I can from them at that moment in time (I also revisit ideas often after gaining new inspiration etc for them). This particular interest, the clay sculptures, are a concept that I have continued to examine and develop over three years, from the beginning of my degree to now, and I still feel like I have a lot of mileage to go in regards to them. I am still unsure as to what they are to me, what they mean, why I make them or the reasons for doing so. Usually I have an idea of what my artwork means to me, or the ideas and messages behind it, but with these sculptures it is not the case; maybe this is why I find them so intriguing?
I first started making these sculptures as a method of dealing with my own self doubt as an artist, something I have an abundance of. They were imperfect, I only used my hands to sculpt them, no sculpting tools to try and refine them. This helped me a lot because I couldn’t make them “perfect”, what would a perfect sculpture even look like? They just were. Taking only a few minutes to create each one, they were a quick and playful way for me to create something. Even now while I create them, I run through a whole range of emotions, from loathing them, to enjoying the feeling of the clay as I press it and mould it with my fingers. The process of making them can be conflicting, because it’s both rewarding and quite hard work mentally.
Now I continue to create these sculptures, I feel that they have moved beyond their initial purpose of creating them to get over my art ‘gremlins’. They hold something more in them, but I am still uncertain as to what that could be. One thing that holds a clue for me, is that I keep instinctively wanting to call them figures instead of sculptures. They aren’t figurative as they have no representation of the human form within them, they are imagined forms. However, wanting to call them figures may hint at implications of how I view them as an artist. Maybe I view them as some sort of creature, or organism, as they have certain qualities of animation about them (many people refer to Jan Svankmajer and his animations, particularly the socks in Alice, which share similar aspects with the caterpillar pictured below).
I will continue to examine the clay sculptures in another post, once I have had time to articulate more of my thoughts about them.
