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Description
Ahh, the first real product of Grad Studio I.

I'm taking this, my first semester of grad school, as an opportunity to really work out my issues / continue my love affair with assemblage sculpture. I simultaneously feel really excited and passionate about working this way, and really skeptical and confused about it, so I'm gonna do it and write about it and hopefully get some good feedback and come out the other end with a body of work and a better sense of how this stuff fits into my creative practice (ooh yeah I said a big term, I'm a big kid).

So I started on a pretty personal note---this is a shrine/love letter/thank you to the Providence Bridge (also known as the "standing bridge", "drawbridge", "up bridge", "ghost bridge" and occasionally the "suicide bridge"), an East Side icon and one of my favorite places in the city. I spent a lot of time there last year and several of the components for this piece were gathered on the beach directly under the bridge (the board, nails, iron scraps) or came from within a few miles (the spine, the bell). The ivy was created using paper mache technique over wire, with pages from a nicely yellowed 1970s copy of Grey's Anatomy. The idea for this piece came in part from a meditation exercise led by a friend of mine during an all-night art lock-in...I was sleep-deprived and hazy and ended up having a really beautiful half-dream about the Bridge, and many months later this is the result.

I'm starting to realize that my assemblages often end up being so personal and made up of things that are so important to me that I will probably never be able to let myself sell them. This is actually okay with me but doesn't help my finances or my slight hoarding problem.

Description
Ahh, the first real product of Grad Studio I.

I'm taking this, my first semester of grad school, as an opportunity to really work out my issues / continue my love affair with assemblage sculpture. I simultaneously feel really excited and passionate about working this way, and really skeptical and confused about it, so I'm gonna do it and write about it and hopefully get some good feedback and come out the other end with a body of work and a better sense of how this stuff fits into my creative practice (ooh yeah I said a big term, I'm a big kid).

So I started on a pretty personal note---this is a shrine/love letter/thank you to the Providence Bridge (also known as the "standing bridge", "drawbridge", "up bridge", "ghost bridge" and occasionally the "suicide bridge"), an East Side icon and one of my favorite places in the city. I spent a lot of time there last year and several of the components for this piece were gathered on the beach directly under the bridge (the board, nails, iron scraps) or came from within a few miles (the spine, the bell). The ivy was created using paper mache technique over wire, with pages from a nicely yellowed 1970s copy of Grey's Anatomy. The idea for this piece came in part from a meditation exercise led by a friend of mine during an all-night art lock-in...I was sleep-deprived and hazy and ended up having a really beautiful half-dream about the Bridge, and many months later this is the result.

I'm starting to realize that my assemblages often end up being so personal and made up of things that are so important to me that I will probably never be able to let myself sell them. This is actually okay with me but doesn't help my finances or my slight hoarding problem.