​​The Concept
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This piece is a combination of sculpture, animation and performance. Essentially, our goal is to explore the fundamental difference between the performing and the plastic arts. For better and for worse, the performer is inherently dependent on their own presence; Their work simply does not exist without them. Like Narcissus, it is breathtaking - yet temporary.
As a plastic artist, it is my privilege to not be present when my work is observed - it is independent of me and must therefore bear praise, criticism or ridicule on its own while I go and have a drink with friends. My work is not me. Like Echo, my work is everlasting, but weak, it is an imitation, it is not real. Could a sculpture ever have the magnetic power of a living, breathing human being in the midst of their creation? This is the basis for our attempt to combine and mirror these two sides of art.
In Practice
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Working with Ira, a performance artist (and friend), we shot a video of her in motion. Then I created a sculpture and following in her footsteps, tried to trace her movement in clay, pausing to take a picture for each frame, to create a clay stop-motion animation (sometimes called ‘claymation’).
Each time the clay gave up and fell apart I put the clay figure aside and created a new one to work with from where I’d stopped. Meaning that by the time I had a 30 second animation, there were three broken, ‘used up’ Ira sculptures lying on the table. I dried and fired them so that we now have three Iras dancing: the live performing Ira, the animated loop of her dance, and the broken sculptures depicting the key moments in which they had collapsed.​​
These are some "used-up" sculptures that collapsed
during the filming, and were then hollowed, dried and fired.
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The pieces are made of white clay, approx. 20x20x20cm, fired with iron and copper oxised.
I started this project working with minature pieces like those above, as the smaller the sculpture - the less it will battle gravity and so the easier it will be to move and manipulate without an armature. However I got fed up with working doll-size and not being able to really feel the clay, so we moved to larger pieces which required Ira to create slower and simpler movements for me to follow, now with a larger "doll" with an armature.
This let to the Hermaphroditus project, which was made with a half life-size sculpture.