Week 4

March 25, 2018

BA3a Reflective journal

Mon 16th Oct – 22nd Oct

This week feels as if it has been a mild turning point for the early start of my year. So far I have been working on my research report as a secondary project, on the back burners so to speak. Therefore I have in a way given myself a kick up the ass to refocus myself; I felt as if I was losing sight of what my practice was about these hybrid creatures I’m creating, I realised on the Monday morning when I looked at the new larger drawing I had started at the end of the previous week I had forgotten its purpose why I was interested in these beings. I knew it was a reflection of the darker aspects of the human soul. But if someone had asked me there and then what this entailed I would have been dumbstruck. Therefore I returned to my research, my brain needed a jump start.

Before I began fully devoting my efforts this week I finished the latest life size drawing, this one being the largest yet at 275cm long, The purpose of this drawing was to create a properly proportioned hybrid, which clearly had a humanoid body which could believably shift from four legged beast position to a two legged bipedal human pose.

I learnt from my mistakes from the previous drawing and chose to nail the drawing to the wall to work vertically this allowed me to view the work levelly without seeing the work at an angle resultantly causing the top half of the drawing to be out of proportion with the lower. Furthermore by working standing up I could work quicker and keep stepping back to see the full image, helping to gauge the progress of the work.

The anatomically, proportionately accurate human/animal hybrid, The idea of the form is to cause the audience to feel inferior everything about this form is to make it superior to humans, the form dwarfs the average human if stood upright it would roughly be well over three meters tall, roughly the same scale as the average polar bear. Thus making it seem physically superior, furthermore the human aspects are supposed to make the links to human intelligence and ingenuity. This I have tried to emphasise by maintaining the jackal ears which link to the god Anubis a wise guardian spirit from the Egyptian mythology thus giving this figure a sense of wisdom.

I have been feeling daunted by the prospect of creating this thing as a life size sculpture which will be a goliath task, however with the studio day tutorials I spoke with two other tutors both of whom have pushed me to create this. As a physical object in the room it would be difficult to not feel intimidated by such a presence. One tutor suggested visiting a practicing artist in Ipswich who he knows, this artists being Lawrence Edwards who creates large figurative sculptures using his own foundry. Therefore it would be good for me to get a better understanding of these largescale projects.

I plan to create a steal rod armature which I’ll spot weld together, this will then be wrapped in chicken wire and then covered in damp newspaper and bags to shape the bulk of the form, this would then be coated in plaster and scrim finally coated in a thin layer of plaster which will be sculpted into to add the details of the form.

The next image I create will be next week, however it will be a front profile of this beast, to settle on how to draw this from the front perspective I have again used Photoshop to create an anatomically correct front profile. Which I have attached below. Although I’m not fully settled on it yet as I’m unhappy with the width of the shoulders compared to the width of the hypes which are much wider.

Furthermore this figure needs more human hands to show that the creature is still capable of human actions related to dexile hands. The skull I used was the design created and used to sculpt the human wolf hybrid skull at the end of BA2a.

Once the drawing was finished late on the Tuesday I refocused my attention on my research report. Continuing from where I left off before the drawings, I read the notes I had previously made, and began reading several new articles and vital sections of previously read key texts. In doing so I have refreshed in my mind the purpose of my practice, it’s a reflection of how we humans have used these hybrid beasts to embody the ugly nature of humans so that as a species we can go on believing that we are crystal clean above the savagery of other animals, however the truth is we are darker, more violent more savage than anything else, these hybrids are simply aliases for our dark misdeeds removing the guilt. Therefore I create hybrid figures which are physically superior to us, so that it puts us in our place makes us feel inferior to knock us off our pedestal. Working off of this fresh start I have finished a draft for the introduction to my research report in doing so this has helped me plan out the extended essay. Whereas at the start of the unit my plan was a spiral of ideas and points flowing in and out of one another with no linear route through each one, now that I have spent the week I have now got a clear step by step plan.