project progress

For my fourth plinth project, my assignment is to create an artistic

Statue that can be placed onto the fourth plinth in Trafalgar square.For a few weeks I’ve been coming up with ideas on what to create for my project outcome.  Making sketch ideas of different objects that I could create a statue of for the plinth. My main course of interest for the fourth plinth statue involves something to do with public issues, for example how the public is always on their phones and most of their life happens on their phone. Also the hunger for money that floods through everyone. 

 The idea am going for is the issue about the public fighting for money. Therefore, the hand gripping money tightly. The reason being why I choose this for my statue is because the public is held on strings by money. Although it’s the one thing that keeps the world on its knees, it’s also the thing that the public bow down to as it gives them so much power. The two artists that inspired me to create this type of statue are Hans Haacke and David Shrigley. Hans’s statue portrays a skeleton of a horse with a ribbon on its front leg, displaying a live feed ticker of the London’s stock exchange. Hans statue was a very powerful statue, it made a complete ling between money; power and history.  Shrigley statue was my second inspiration because his statues figure gave me the inspiration to create the gripping hand. Which also gave the statue a strong statement of what I’m trying to portray thru the sculpture.

 I used different materials to create the sculpture. Experimenting and developing the statue in different styles. I used different materials such as cardboard and mud rock. I attempted to create my object in a 3d forum while using cardboard. It was quite difficult, but during the processes I watched what my classmates done to make their object in 3d forum, after observing I finally was able to create my statue to be able to see the whole object from all angles.  Creating my sculpture with mud rock was a lot easier, I used Vaseline and applied it onto my own hand to create a realistic shape of the figure. I wrapped mud rock around my hand to get the shape and figure of the hand perfectly. Which also saved time planning and trying to make the figure realistic and 3 dimensional.

 These are a few images I took of my designs of my sculpture using different materials. I also took a few images of what I was inspired by when I was drawing my designs of my figure from different angles. Looking at the sculpture from a perspective view point (as if I was looking at an actually sculpture from a worms eye view).

Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder is am American sculptor. His sculptors were always distorted and verified different scales and shapes. Calder also created wire sculptures of portraits, figures and animals. In the wire sculptors you could figure out what the object was, but the figure would always be slightly distorted as it is hard to frame the exact shape of the subject using wire.

This is one of my favourite wire sculpture. The

Style of the sculpture interests me, as it seems to

Be half cubism with a few features of the face,

And also art Nuevo with the use of lines for the

Hair. Another thing that interests me about this

Sculpture, is the simplicity of the subject, but

Also how difficult it is to make and create the final outcome if it. The piece of art work displays a portrait of a woman with distorted facial features, showing an unperfected sculpture. I think what Calder was trying to show/explain thru his sculptures, is that not everything is as it seems; and not everything is perfect. So by changing the scale and figures of his sculptures, he was trying to change what people saw and to also change people’s views on perfect.

A few more of the artist’s work and sculptures....