My wonderful wife blogs even less often than me(!), but with good reason: She’s making some super cool art. Part of this weekend was spent taking photos of her work. She’s preparing her submissions to the UMM Annual Juried Student Art Exhibition, and needed photos for the submissions.
A lot of her work these days is sculpture, but she is submitting one art book: “30 days of November”. The pages are all “tea sheets”, one from each day in November, 2008. For 2.5 years she’s been documenting every time she’s had a cuppa in a variety of ways, one of which is tipping out the leaves onto a 4×3 inch sheet of paper, which then leaves a stain. The “front” side of each page is the “stain” side, and she then embellished the backs in a number of different ways.
I’ve taken some other photos of the process (10.10am, The aftermath, and Pekoe), and it’s really cool to see a book made out of these. The “triptych” above is what she’s actually submitted for consideration. The shot below didn’t end up in the submission shot, but I liked the way the light worked so I posted it on Flickr anyway.
The other pieces she’s submitting are all metal sculpture, three in aluminum, and one in bronze. One of the cool things about the one to the right is that the top part is made using hair. Sue’s been collecting her hair for quite a while, and she finds that it naturally balls up in interesting ways. Here she’s packed a ball of hair in damp sand and poured in molten aluminum to capture the texture.
The other aluminum pieces were made by carving polystyrene foam, which the molten aluminum replaces. The bronze piece at the bottom was made using a silica mold, and then treated in all kinds of crazy ways to get a patina she was happy with.
