Classes are officially over, next week is finals. I will continue to work out of the BYU Studio over the Summer, there is allot going on in my head and I need to get it out in clay! One of my assignments over the past semester was to pick an artist and start by mimicking their work and style. Then continue to make work that uses elements of their work, but in the process add my own elements. The idea is that by the time you get to your fourth or fifth piece they will be yours and not the other artists. For this assignment I picked Mariana Monteagudo. She has done a series of ceramic mixed-media dolls that I really enjoy. I started by appropriating her work at least in the doll’s form and composition and now I am working through a series that really has me excited. I am looking forward to finishing them so I can post some pictures of the final work for you all to see. I have been drawn to figurative work for the past few years and this is a great way for me to explore those avenues and include elements from my previous work. I really feel like things are starting to come together for me.
On another note, besides selling my work I have picked up a part-time job at a local company, “Fossil Logic”, where I am working as a sculptor repairing and sculpting dinosaur fossils. It is a pretty exciting job. We get the fossils straight from the field where they have been packed in their field jackets and we remove the rock and debris from the fossil. Then we repair and sculpt the missing pieces of the fossils and skeletons, then assemble them together on the armatures that we make to hold the display. It has been great to be working in a similar vein to what I have been studying in school and to get a chance to exercise my artistic muscles. I have been learning new techniques and mediums that will be of a great benefit to me in the future.