sculpture

Patricia Piccinini

Posted by hil

Ron Mueck’s sculpture has reminded me of the Melbourne artist Patricia Piccinini. Apart from her own site, the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery has the best collection of Piccinini’s work online.

Her exhibitions reflect a variety of interests and styles, but I am particularly taken by her sculptures that explore possible outcomes of genetic engineering and technology on humankind. We Are Family: 2003 Venice Biennale is absolutely intreguing and challenging. Take for example The Young Family, the prematurely aging Game Boys Advanced or the Meerman from Leather Landscape. As with Ron Mueck’s sculptures, the realism and detail achieved is remarkable.

Update: Sam Jinks is the sculptor/maker who has worked with Piccinini on many of her works.

Ron Mueck’s Pregnant Woman sculpture

Posted by hil

One of the recent acquisitions at the National Gallery of Australia here in Canberra is a larger-than-life sculpture of a naked pregnant woman by Ron Mueck. Its an extraordinary thing: 2.5 metres tall, and so life-like in its attention to the minutest detail and colouring that you are compelled to get up close to look, and then suddenly feel as if you have got way too personal. Then again the woman seems entirely in her own world, feeling the enormity of pregnancy in every way, and as if nothing else can impinge on those sensations.

The gallery is also showing a video of the making of Pregnant Woman, which was very interesting to me as a maker. The sculpture is made of fibre glass and silicon, and the video shows the elaborate processes of mold making and casting that was involved. I’m not sure if the video being offered for sale at the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London, is the same, but it looks from the description as if it might be. One technique that I thought might prove useful is that shellac can be painted on a clay sculpture to prevent it drying out.

Here are some links to some collections of Ron Mueck’s amazing work: again, the sculptures are all superbly realistic except for some twist involving scale:

Dead Dad from the BBC’s The Saatchi Phenomenon . The figure is less than life-size in death.
Artmolds.com. Numerous works.
ABC’s Gateway to Arts and Culture: 49th Venice Biennale: Ron Mueck’s ‘Boy’. This includes a RealVideo walkaround of ‘Boy’ shot by Pollyanna Sutton.
Boy. A couple of pictures.
James Cohen Galleries. Numerous works pictured, and a collection of articles and reviews in pdf files.

Mystery of the big foam foot

Posted by hil

A 3′ x 5′ sculpted foam rubber foot has mysteriously been doing the rounds of Westwood somewhere near Boston. In a bigger picture, the finish looks surprisingly smooth and hard for foam rubber that has been carted around, and its puzzling that its described as too heavy for one person to carry. Pretty cool foot though :-).

Howard statue update

Posted by hil

Greg Taylor’s sculpture of John Howard that I blogged about in late February is apparently in storage at the moment until an unveiling at the National Folk Festival over the Easter weekend.

I’ve also found an ABC 666 page about the sculpture, which includes two pictures of the statue being removed from Reconcilliation Walk, and a couple of radio interviews with Greg Taylor at the time. The interesting thing about the second interview is that the joking talk about businesses having to ‘pay ransom’ to get the statue moved from their premises came back to haunt this last week. A local liberal MP claimed that ActewAGL, the company to first to host the statue outside their shopfront, had been blackmailed into making a donation. Both the sculptor and the CEO of ActewAGL dismissed the claims as ridiculous.

Chomick & Meder: figurative art and automata

Posted by hil

Chomick & Meder is a wonderful site detailing the figurative art and automata of Peter Meder and Chris Chomick. Most of the figures are one-of-a-kind doll art, standing between 30 – 50 cm tall, and with heads, hands and feet sculpted from Cernit (something akin to Sculpy, maybe?). The figures are beautifully dressed, too. But its the odd and amusing characters that really draw me in. Take Elvisan, or Baby Dewey, or JouJou L’Amour for instance.

A number of the figures have hand made automata mechanisms. These have been designed and machined by the artist, and consist of ‘an internal crankshaft, which enables the Automaton to operate at varied speed, in forward or reverse. The brass hand-crank mechanism operates a counterbalanced armature, creating a rhythmic side-to-side motion with alternating leg kicks’. In the automata gallery are three monkeys, Cecil and Emo, and the mad scientist Dr. Messmore, MD. With the last, the artist has been developing ‘a programmable automaton using servo electronics controlled by a laptop computer’ enabling ‘customized movements, essentially creating one-of-a-kind moving figurative sculptures’. Its described as an ongoing process, in which the ‘ultimate goal is to have the automaton operate independently of the computer, evolving from an educational tool to an art object desired by collectors of automata’.

Kinetic sculptures : ‘Wood that Works’

Posted by hil

Wood that Works is a portfolio of beautiful wooden kinetic sculptures by David C. Roy who works out of Ashford, Connecticut. My favourite is Variations, but there is something about the unexpected timing in Migration, that is very attractive too. Each of the sculptures is powered by a constant force or Negator spring which you wind up to start the motion, and the movement lasts from 2 to 18 hours, depending on the sculpture.

Roy recommends one book for its great mechanism drawings: Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements by Henry T. Brown (copyright 1868, 1896). Actually, I like its full title from the seventeenth edition of 1893 even better:

“Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements, Embracing All Those Which Are Most Important In Dynamics, Hydraulics, Hydrostatics, Pneumatics, Steam Engines, Mill and other Gearing, Presses, Horology, and Miscellaneous Machinery: and including Many Movements Never Before Published and Several Which Have only Recently Come into Use”

Starr Kempf’s Wind Sculptures

Posted by hil

A net friend of mine pointed me to Starr Kempf’s amazing steel wind sculpures which are in a canyon out of Colorado Springs. These are kinetic too, and while the canyon is sheltered, they do set up a hum at times.

John Howard Statue: ‘If the Boots Don’t Fit’

Posted by hil

On Saturday Feb 7th the Melbourne sculptor Greg Taylor erected this fine life-size bronze sculpture of the Prime Minister, John Howard, in Reconcilliaton Walk in front of Old Parliament House in Canberra.

Called ‘If the Boots Don’t Fit’, it is reminiscent of all those noble-looking statues at ANZAC memorials across the country, but a wonderfully stunted one: the boots are like Goofy’s, the uniform baggy and oversized, the rifle held back to front and the hat worn with the wrong side up. Add in the droopy-shouldered stance and the self-satisfied expression and you have fine satire. Taylor says his artwork is intended to draw attention to Mr Howard’s “smallness” in a metaphysical, spiritual and political sense.

Unfortunately, the National Capital Authority removed it promptly the next day. And ever since, events surrounding the statue have just kept bubbling along in a very entertaining manner.

On the following Thursday, the Canberra Times reported that the statue had been found ‘behind barbed wire’, in an NCA ‘detention camp’: a storage compound in Commonwealth Park. That day Taylor was allowed to hire a crane to lift the one-tonne statue out, and by then our electricity and water company, ActewAGL, had offered to pay $2000 to charity if they could exhibit it outside their shopfront in Garema Place in the city for a few days. Click on the thumbnails below to view images.

Since then:

Jon Stanhope, the Chief Minister of the ACT, has said he would like the ACT to buy the statue so that even if Howard won’t live here himself, at least the statue will have a permanent home here. That is causing consternation in some quarters! Some people have suggested the people of Canberra would be willing to subscribe to a fund to buy it if that plan falls through. Meanwhile, the head of ActewAGL apologized if they had offended anyone, saying exhibiting the statue was only intended to be a bit of fun.

The letters to the editor have been vitriolic and amusing on both sides.

The Sunday Canberra Times editorialized about the value of satire, and surmised that Howard himself might have preferred the statue to be allowed to stand in the first place.

Geoff Pryor, our cartoonist, had some fun with it all.

The art critic Sacha Grishan reviewed the work and concluded that the only reason it did not fit the bill as artwork that the ACT might purchase was that it had not been commissioned.

The NCA is considering charging Taylor $850 for the removal and ‘storage’.

There were rowdy scenes in a Senate Estimates Committee when the Territories Minister expressed outrage at having his Sunday afternoon interupted by the NCA advising him of the statues removal. Also, “Senator Heffernan asked what would happen if ‘every second yobo’ wanted to erect effigies on Commonwealth land in future. ACT Senator Kate Lundy suggested the NCA could erect big fences around any open space.” ;-P.

The statue has spent last week outside the Hawker Butchery, and a sausage sizzle was held in its honour, with donations going to the charity Koomari. Tomorrow it apparently moves on to be on show outside the Kingston Hotel.

Stay tuned, folks… And thanks, Greg!

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