Recently in Sculptures Category

I began with ideas of a stump with a hollow in the side so that the dancers could sit on top of it, or curl up inside the tree. However, I did not have the time to construct something like that, and the driftwood Anna had for me to use spoke in a different way to me. Upon first seeing the wood, all my previous thoughts about what I was going to make went out the window, and I let the material inform how I was going to build because each piece was so unique.

I got the wood over to the studio in Regis and, by chance, found another piece of driftwood in the free pile in the wood assembly room that was bigger than all the others Anna gave me. I began with that piece and the other large pieces Anna had and started the base of the tree. I was frustrated at first, because the log was rotted out and anytime I placed a screw in it, the wood crumbled and didn't hold. I eventually found a place to screw the wood together.

Piece by piece, I built the tree. I did not try to plan ahead other than laying out the pieces from big to small. I let each piece of wood and its shape in relation to what I was slowly creating inform me where to put it. After 4 hours I finally managed to get the majority of the wood screwed together. But the tree was still only about 5 feet tall. I wanted it to take up more space.

My friend Nichole helped me out - (she was the lighting designer for Barefoot). She noticed they had trimmed the branches of the trees over by Midwest Mountaineering, and we walked over there one night and grabbed a few of the twisted branches and stored them in Regis East. The next night, we moved all the branches and the 5' driftwood tree over to the installation and performance space across the street and I showed it to Anna. She agreed that it needed to be taller, so I played around with some of the branches to see which one fit. We chose one of the branches from the conifer trees and I tied it with twine to the back of the tree. It took up a lot of space and made the tree taller and have more presence even though it was just a branch.

I finished the tree by tying a bone to one of the branches, and placing other bones and wood pieces around and on the tree.

It didn't turn out the way I originally planned; the dancers couldn't sit on it, or crawl into it. However, the tree did have a lot of personality and did allow itself to be interacted with - the dancers kept sand in a bowl behind it and also used the tree's various branches and niches to hold the raven mask during different parts of the performance.

It was really cool to see this tree come to life out of wood that was once apart of other living trees. It wasn't actually alive, but because we made it so, its personality came out and helped further the notion of the human mark - I, a human, made the tree. However, it was because of my relationship with nature and my imitation of nature's creation that the form came to be.

A cairn is a pile of rocks made by a human. It is a marker - in history it was sometimes used as a landmark, or sometimes it was created to mark a burial site. In the context of this performance, we used it as a representation and symbol of the idea of the human marker. It marked our presence and intentions behind exploring what it meant to make our mark in nature by only using nature as the medium through which to get this point across.

For me, it became more than a marker - it became the process of life. I had to devise ways to find the rocks, transport them, store them, arrange and display them, upkeep them, then re-distribute them back to nature after the performance was finished. Not only did I become aware and go through this process, I also became aware of the mark of nature and its process - I made the cairn because I assembled the rocks, but I didn't make the rocks. While I can label and mark the cairn (a symbol of a mark) as my own creation, that's only recognized in our culture. The cairn itself represents this performance's mark by our cultural standards, and my creating it represents my own mark as a human being living and moving and using resources. Yet, it is no more a possession of mine than is my own body - the cairn went back to the earth as I will one day.

The cairn was also continuously changing. It was never the same from one performance to the next, as we rearranged the rocks before, during, and after each performance. Each rock's relation to one another changed the shape of the cairn overall, and became a mark of everyone who visited the space as each human helped shape the cairn and make their own mark by placing rocks they carried onto it each night.

In the end, it was like saying goodbye to an old friend. I had gone through this process and this journey with these rocks. I had carried them on my back as I biked with them, I had carried them by hand in backs and driven with them, I had carted them around and had to pick up and handle every single rock every time i had to store them or re-arrange them. Then I placed them in a different spot from where I got them and created another kind of cairn - one that represented our mark not only of a performance gone by, but also a mark of the students who were here at this moment in time. Remnants of the cairns from our performance now form a new cairn somewhere on campus to mark our place in this university. It's all natural, and it's not permanent.

I sat in and watched the dancers rehearse before I started designing so I could brainstorm on what I wanted to make. I mapped out all my ideas and I came down to two ideas based on availability of time and on Anna's wishes for the piece - a pile of rocks (the cairn), and a stump/tree/perch. In addition to these sculptures, Anna asked me to make a "portal" through which the audiences could enter and exit the space.

I kept in mind the following ideas for these sculptures from my brainstorming:
- Not overpowering the space but rather complimenting it
- Abstract yet suggestive
- Dual use of design - neutral yet changeable to fit the mood - designs that can
be comforting, bare, full of life, dead, and imposing depending on the mood of
the dance
- Natural yet clean - do not clutter the space, but it's okay to be a little messy
since it is natural for things to be imperfect
- Interactive pieces - sculptures for the dancers to play on and use, not static.
- How to display these things in space - what do they sit on, how big are
they/levels

In the end, the portal fit into the door perfectly. I used a 2x4 frame and painted it black then stretched white fabric over it and stapled that to the frame. The fabric was white so we could project an image onto the flat surface, and it was stretchy so people could stretch it open to walk through it. It ended up looking like a vaginal opening leading into a womb - much to Anna's delight as it fit in well with the feminine mood to the piece.

Here's the projector stand I had to build in addition to the portal in order to hang the projector from it to project a movie of the ocean with a full moon reflecting in it.

The tree was bare, and accomplished many of my original ideas for what it had to accomplish. It was somewhat abstract since it was all made out of driftwood, bones, and a single branch, yet still suggested and resembled a tree due to its size. It helped break up the space and created levels - it was tall and skinny in contrast to the short, stout cairn on the opposite side of the space. It was neutral, yet changed according to the mood of the scene and the relation of the dancers and audience to it and the lighting. It looked especially dry and bare and dead during the desert scene because of the bones; it looked menacing during the mountain scene because of the red light on it; and it looked alive and comforting because of its form and the cool blue lighting on it during the rain scene.

The cairn became the mark of the human since it was strategically placed by us, and since it was added to and taken from every night as audiences added rocks to it, and as I took them back at the end of the performance to heat them up and start over again. Not only that, but they were real rocks in the space. We didn't simply create a hollow core then put rocks on the outer surface to make it seem like it was a solid rock pile; it actually was a giant rock pile. The presence of each rock and the process behind acquiring, moving, storing, and placing them (not to mention their origins and how they were created by nature) gave the cairn a lot of character and helped to ground the space.

Another shot of the tree lit by light from the mountain scene in the performance.

After collecting the driftwood from Anna, I began assembling it piece by piece based on the individual sizes, the weight, and the composition of the wood. It was difficult working with the base of the tree because the large vertical piece was pretty rotted out and the screws weren't holding it very well. I eventually found a few places where they stuck, though, and I continued assembling piece by piece as the tree informed me how it wanted to look as I went through the process of building it.

Here's the tree after I assembled all the main pieces.

Here it is in the performance and installation space. It was only about 5 feet tall, so I wanted to add on a branch to help fill it out and make it have more of a presence. You can see the branches we were working with in the background.

After picking out a branch, I tied it with twine to the tree and added the bones from Anna at the base and the one hanging off the side.

A close up of the base.

The finished tree with the Raven mask hanging off of it.

Here's the driftwood I will be using to create a tree sculpture for the space.

Here is the beginnings of the portal Anna wanted me to make.

I measured the size of the door to the installation and performance space in Regis West and built this frame to fit inside of it.
I will be painting the frame black and stretching white fabric over it so that a projector can project an image onto it and so that people will be able to walk through it into the space.