ideas becoming form!

I will try to be brief here. I'm on a bit of a time crunch this evening but I had a really great two days with the residency. I'm also going to be taking courses through Drexel (online mostly) for a Masters in Arts Administration. I'm feeling the pressure but it's resulting in an intense drive to be more organized and deliberately use my time wisely. Yesterday I met the advanced class. They're a great group of students who range from those that have only taken Sculpture 1 to those that have taken every class MVU has to offer in the arts. They're obviously passionate and rearing to get to work. We'll be welding on Tuesday and talking about the figure tomorrow evening. The Sculpture 1 class is still working on building a vocabulary so it's a bit slow moving to get to know them and see what they're really capable of. Today I sat in on a mini super casual crit with Sculpture 1 and began reading the material I've collected. Below is an image of some of the books I'm working through to help inform my work. 

Reading all the things!

I also did a mini experiment making a fossil like mold for some lace imprinting I might do. I keep coming back to lace because of the term Lazos. It doesn't translate to lace at all in Spanish but the term Lazos de Sangre has always seemed like it should translate to Blood Lace. Lazos translates to ties and the most popular form of lace making in Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic comes from the bobbin lace traditions of Colonial Spain. It's a time consuming process and involves knots building up in special patterns. It's mostly seen in ceremonial clothing (baptisms, weddings etc.) that usually happen in the church proper. The pillow that is used to knot the lace is called a mundillo which translates to a diminuitive of the word mundo which is world. Essentially the women that practice making bobbin lace have their own little worlds they're working from and I think that's so poetic. Today a lot of older Latinx women have a tendency (and this is a running joke amongst Puerto Ricans) to decorate their houses with lots of lace, crocheted cozies and the like. I feel like there is some tie to the almost sacred nature of traditional mundillo made lace to this sort of re-appropriation in the household where things like toilet covers, air fresheners and table cloths are made of lace. This bears a new meaning to me if one considers the significance of the trend or practice in Latinx women in the states. I'll dive into that more in later posts. :)

Here is the plaster of paris mold I might use. I've tinted it to see how much detail I captured from the plasticine cast I made of lace.

I also made some mock-ups and sketches that build on my Diosa Madre. I have tons more info on Atabeira but I will save that for a separate post. For now here is what I'm thinking it will look like. 

This is an early sketch that followed the one from Blog Post 2. I'm toying with more abstraction here.

I like to make little maquettes of parts I'm having a hard time sketching. They're very rudimentary but necessary to the process.

Here is a life size rendering of the scale of what I'm thinking about. It's pretty big. About 6 feet in height so far?

And this is what is a near final sketch that has tons of notes about material etc.

So tomorrow I'm going to sit in on the figure building segment and we'll talk about casting. I'm working on some experiments for this piece and will be posting the different stages as they develop. Line and I discussed this piece and we agreed I should build some more maquettes and experiment with materials. I'm super excited to get started on this one.