Paint and canvas are cheap compared to mold making materials like rubber, casting metals and foundry costs. Painting's physical labor is easy compared to the exertion required for carving, fabrication, or casting. Painting can be a solo art where sculpture requires team work- even if it's a team of one.
That's all true until I begin to paint my sculpture.
Years ago, I thought I could choose form and be able to forget about color. Just oil the wood carving or seal the marble and it's done. I love the white on white monochromatic subtle forms of the plasters. But that doesn't mean others will understand without the color that helps tell the story.
Can a sculpture also be environmentally functional?
Waterpleinen is a project designed by Florian Boer and Marco Vermeulen for the city of Rotterdam to reconfigure storm water. Instead of channeling water underground in expensive to build (and easy to overflow sewers) they've designed an urban landscape that changes it's function according to the weather.
The article on Pruned says "instead of being buried in concrete, excised from the daily life of the city and only experienced by municipal workers, urban hydrology is visibly, even prominently, incorporated into the surface fabric of the city. Programmed with recreational opportunities when its dry and even while inundated, its infrastructure provides active public spaces for the local area, not dark playgrounds for a handful of urban explorers. It even becomes an event, its frolicking rivulets and interior lakes staged for the young and old."
Years ago, after seeing us dance, a child asked us if "we danced in the river?" We both loved that question. Here's a performance Carolyn Stuart and I did at The West Coast Contact Improvisation Festival. This video resurfaced after a couple of years... The color is off ( we're wearing soft blues) and the camera shaky, but it's better than that vanished space dance disappears to when it's finished.
A lot of Contact Improvisation performance is high flying, high energy. We wanted to create a gentle flowing dance instead, and called our piece "in the River".
Anything to do with water has my attention. I'm calling these bubbles sculpture because they're perfect dimensional circles of air moving through space. There is no more primal shape than that.
This lovely video (music: "Half way through the woods", by Stephen Sondheim) shows dolphins playing with bubble rings that they generate by blowing air out their blow holes. The ring has surprising strength and tenacity. (a whole study needs to be done on that!)
Inventor David Whiteis has created what he calls "BUBBLE RINGS, " just like the dolphins. They're beautiful, totally ephemeral, and raise more questions than they answer. (my favorite aspect of creativity.) It turns out that there's an entire category on youtube of folks blowing these beautiful shapes.
I've had Water on the brain for several years. It's inspired my Nature of Water sculpture series. Always looking for how others treat the subject of water....
Water Kiss is a delightful video that evokes deeper thoughts on water's and life's ephemeral nature. It's elemental, literally, in it's use of materials: water, air, sunlight, love.
The flim is water stop-motion experiment by Sam3 filmed in Alicante, Spain more info: sam3.es
This video is by Jon Rawlinson and features the Kuroshio Sea, the 2nd largest aquarium in the world. The music is "Please Don't Go" by Barcelona. Jon Rawlinson is a producer, cameraman and editor (another one man army?) based in Vancouver, Canada.
So many emotions and thoughts come up watching this video.
First the sheer dreamy beauty of watching these creatures move, then the scale of it kicks in seeing the silhouettes of people. Then I notice the sterility and density of the environment, with basically every fish swimming in the same direction, not much cover to hide out. How do they care for all these different species, what is meal time like? That leads me to wonder about all the science involved in caring for them. You can't take the smallest organism out of it's environment with it and you paying a steep price.
Rawlinson's choice of the melancholic "Please Don't Go" adds another layer as we watch a seldom seen view of the world drift by? One last view?
??????????????????????????????????????????
If this environment raises folks awareness of the need to protect our oceans, its doing its job.
