Longest Sculpture Project Ever! The Boat.

Reverie- [rev-uh-ree] noun. a daydream

I have been working on the completion of my giant sculpture piece since the beginning of December 2008. It is finally coming to a closure.

This project came about when we were looking through an art book, looking at Lisa Claugue's art especially. We were looking at the animals that she makes by dipping stuffed animals in slip and then firing them in the kiln, at high temperatures making the animals burn away leaving the form of the animal in clay.

I then created mask that fits onto the animal's face in order to portray that he wanted a different characteristic. I sculpted a fish maskThis is the mask. In this picture, the mask isn't completely finished because the glaze wasn't completely finished in its process.

This is the animal that was dipped in Tashi porcelain slip. It was glazed with white majolica and fired at ^06.

Then I went on to create an environment for the animal. This had to somehow connect to the mask. Knowing that the mask happened to be a fish, I decided to make a boat. My main decision to create a boat was based off of a picture that I took while on a trip in Seattle, Washington.

This picture was taken in Olympia, Washington, off of the Puget sound. This picture helped in my creation of the boat because it gave me some type of visual to look off of.

I created my boat with the use of slabs. I cut out a pattern that I then used to get two slabs the same size that connected together. I then used those patterns to hold my boat, while it dried.

The surface technique was one of the hardest parts in completing my project. First, I applied black wash and dry brushed it gray, and then put a crackle solution on the boat. This was a failure. So, I went back to the drawing board and then tried applying milk paint to the boat and then applying the crackle solution, but once again that didn't work correctly. After I did this I decided to leave it the way that it was because i thought that it looked good. But come to figure out that the glaze started to peel off of the surface of the boat. I then tried applying wax to the piece, using a heat gun to melt all the excess wax. This left the texture of the piece feeling really smooth and looking really shiny. In order to create the vision that I wanted I took a rusting solution that made the boat look older. After many steps of trial and error I found the surface technique/ glaze that worked best with what I was trying to portray. On the left is a picture of the first time I applied glaze to the boat (black wash, Gray acrylic paint, crackle solution).

In the picture below you can see how the glaze began to peel off of the surface.

In order to make this look more like a boat I added many other medias, in order to make the boat look more appealing to the eye. The sail of the boat is made out of the pages from a book ("The Rainbow Fish") I also used shells, sand dollars, books, wood, fabric, spray paint, rope, bamboo, and metal. When all of these medias came together, it felt to me like it became one and create a piece that was worth the long while it took to complete this piece.

I decided to name this piece reverie because it means daydream. I felt like by creating this piece, I was trying to focus it more on children because I wanted to portray the theme that 'you can be whoever you want to be if you put your mind to it'. I also felt like books gave you this imaginary feeling like you are inside the book that you are reading and that you could be anyone you wanted to be by using your imagination. So, basically my reasoning for naming this piece reverie would be that you would get lost in your own little world when looking into this piece and imagining the story behind it for yourself.