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Scholarship – 2011:Sculpture (93308)

Examples of Candidate Work

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OUTSTANDING SCHOLARSHIP

This Outstanding Scholarship Sculpture submission presented a sculpturally confident and ambitious series of works. The candidate took a simple notion, to create landscape and used this topic (structure) to move through conceptually driven iterations that explored audience relationships to viewing, utilising the formal conventions of sculptural language. This is a highly productive engagement. The workbook reveals a sculptural investigation that is wide-ranging, intelligent and inquiring. There is a consistent delving into potential areas for experimentation, which are driven by appropriate and lateral contexts and reference (Kimihiko Okado, Katrin Sigurdardottir, Vaughn Bell, to name a few). A real success of this submission is the appropriate employment of scale and perspective to direct the ideas at hand. Scale flips in and out of miniature and real scale, not only through literal scale but also through locating work in exterior sites and landscapes, models, through establishing object human relationships, interior spaces of objects, dioramas and through interactive attributes. Perspective is also another key driver of concepts; the horizon line is used as a tool to implicate specific relationships within the work to the viewer (intimacy versus distance), eg. bending to look through a peephole, acting as the suspension and support for a platform whereby the viewer is implicated as viewer and object, and the portable concept where the work moves with the viewer. The workbook completely verifies the intelligence of this submission and the lengths this candidate went to in order to interrogate the notion of our relationship to landscape. The candidate consistently tests, analyses, reflects and ponders the relevance and potential of ideas to shift their proposition in new directions. The workbook evidences a number of propositional ideas and new work not presented on the folio. Each image is a new idea, which is successfully resolved (they haven’t labored over showing too many views of the same work, just what is required to represent the work). Accessible materials have used throughout, with the integration of existing materials such as the window frame, surveyors’ tripod and found wood for the plinth creating strong making-material-concept links.

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SCHOLARSHIP

This Scholarship Sculpture submission takes the simple premise of arrangement and shelving and uses it both practically and conceptually to develop a cohesive sculptural argument utilising found objects as the central means to stage a large series of works; a clear proposition positioned within the assemblage tradition. Paired up with this is an enquiry led by consideration of simple sculptural principles; horizontal vs. vertical, planar vs. linear, solid vs. transparent, soft vs. hard, light vs. heavy, large vs. small, and so on. Scale plays a large part in communication; the use of objects for their objectness (their existent relationship to shelving) and also as material objects (their ability to act or function as support, ie. act like a shelf). The candidate makes strategic links to practitioners who explore similar territory in adventurous ways, such as Martino Gamper and Hany Armanious as well as drawing on contexts that sit outside of art such as the domestic or found shelving. This folio is an excellent example of a focused enquiry, one that looks widely within a narrow field to consider new directions. This is seen in the constant looking to existent structures and forms as reference points. Making and thinking processes are documented effectively in the workbook and are made apparent in the constant renegotiation of form, format, arrangement, placement, stacking to assert sculptural conventions of gravity and balance, mass and volume. Each individual work displays a particular sensibility to the emphasis of that investigation, whether it is focused on the organic, formal, found, recycled, etc. and builds upon the success of previous work. There is a knowingness in the aesthetic value of the selected materials and objects; they sit comfortably within historic understandings of assemblage and arrangement practices and support the inventive nature of the sculptures themselves. The workbook is clear and coherent and provides insightful supporting evidence of a consistent and in-depth enquiry.

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