1 Comment
Elizabeth Berrien is an internationally recognized wire sculptor. Berrien was born in 1950 and is known as the godmother of the contemporary wire sculpture movement. As a young child she always had an affinity towards animals. She would lay on her lawn for hours and study small ants and other insects. She said that at age five she was gazing at the ceiling and she visualized a long line looping back on itself. She then began to used a crude form of knitting to make a blanket for her pet turtle. While it was not a success, it was from that point that she began to pioneer new uses for fiber. All throughout her years in grade school she was marked as gifted and excelled in math. Her love for geometry and topology were crucial to her later experiments with wire sculpture. Berrien always had trouble expressing herself creatively in high school. She says that she could see the "energy lines" that made animals beautiful but she had difficulty transferring them onto paper. She almost abandoned her passion for art until she was forced to enroll in a sculpture class. Her teacher, Kenneth G. Curran, trained Elizabeth to explore different ways to express herself using creative problem-solving. He forced to to go out of her comfort zone and explore the use of wire. When the idea of her going to art school was proposed, Curran fought against it. He stated, "you're a non-conformist. You're doing a good job not being influenced by Alexander Calder, but most college art teachers have a personal mandate to influence the hell out of their students. Just go out there and have a life, the wire will take care of itself."
QUESTIONS:
1. How does Berrien's choice of material impact the content of her work? Does it impact the content at all? 2. How did what was going on in Berrien's life and what was going on around her change her subject of work? Did it change the content? (use information from the bio on her website) 3. Do the events or people from your past or current life affect your body of work similar to the way Berrien's does? Does your choice of material impact your content? I finished the first layer and disconnected my sculpture from the spool of wire. Then I spray painted it white which didn't work at first and I'm not sure if its going to stick but I decided to do it anyways. We'll see how that goes.
I'm almost done forming the full circle which means I'll finally be able to disconnect my piece from the spool of wire. After that I'll probably spray paint it white then add the second layer of wire.
We had a short studio day today so I did not get much done, but I was able to secure some of the faces together with a thinner wire to make a stronger base. I'm pretty proud of where I am right now and I really like what I chose to do because there isn't really a way for me to 'mess up' since it's an original style and idea. I have about 3/5 of the circle formed and so far it's been an easy process.
I've been working on forming the sphere of faces and trying to get the base layer done. It's hard to take pictures of my sculpture because it's a confusing piece and kind of all over the place right now. I decided that I am going to add another layer of faces on stop of this base layer. A lot of my play pages have been surfaces covered with too many little faces to count that, from far away, just look like scribbles. My goal with this piece is for it to just look like a ball of wire but when people get closer to the piece they see all the faces. Once I finish forming the sphere I'm going to go back through with a thinner wire and add little faces in between the base ones. I haven't decided if I want to spray paint the base layer one color (most likely white if I do end up doing that) to make the smaller wire pop out. We'll see.
I wish I could live like these people do. I was honestly amazed right when we walked in. We were immediately met with this huge piece by Khinde Wiley, I was honestly confused as to how they got it because I wasn't expecting this to be such an official gallery considering it was someone's personal collection. As we walked through we talked about how one can have a personal collection of art. I was amazed of the amount of things that seem so obvious but I had never thought of, like how a working artist will not sell their work to someone unless they know they have the space for it and how overtime when you own a piece the price may continue to rise depending on the success of the artist, meaning you have to update the insurance often My favorite pieces were the sculptures created by the Philadelphia Wire Man. Not only because of the unique use of wire but I was intrigued by the story, which was why I was so excited to have him as my artist spotlight. My other favorite piece was one we did not get to discuss, and I sadly did not get the chance to ask about it. I fell in love with the graffiti on the wall and I wished I had asked about the story behind it. This was one of my favorite art trips or field trips in general that I've ever been on, and I hope one day I get to come back and see the new pieces they have laid out (because I saw their grates filled with too many other pieces to count, and I assume they rotate them as much as they can) |
Julianne
|