S M L XL Research

I planned to get some library books for this project to do with scale and also containment. But I couldn't really find anything. Even the book which the project is based on is about architecture and it just didn't look like it was going to be of any use to me. So I thought I'd look for some books on glass sculpture, pretty much another dead end. So I settled for a very large general sculpture book and found some fairly useful artists that I can study and draw inspiration from.

Matthew Monahan

The book didn't have a description for any of the works, but from what I can see this work does relate to mine. Some aspects of it are contained in various glass structures and other pieces are not. This makes some of the pieces feel more precious than others. I really like this work because it combines lots of different materials into to single compositions. I may draw inspiration from this in that I could get sheet glass or Plexiglas and glue it into shapes to contain things instead of using bottles.

Sean Raspet http://www.seanraspet.org/

This work really interested me. It features glass cubes filled with various objects and then suspended in resin or a thick liquid. Now although contained in glass like the previous artist's work, this doesn't feel as precious and feels more like a frozen moment in time sealed in a box. I really like the effect that this creates and am considering incorporating this into my work.

Terence Koh http://www.asianpunkboy.com/



This artist has completed a variety of different works using well-known and some more obscure methods. In these two very similar pieces, various objects were put inside glass vitrines. This obviously fits with my theme of containment. In the first one, partial heads and faces were cast into lots of different materials and then put into the vitrines. Some of the glass was broken or taken out to add interest. In the second piece many random objects were painted completed white and then placed in the vitrines. In both pieces the glass boxes are arranged in a maze of sorts which must be navigated physically and by the eye in order to take in all the work has to offer. I really like these pieces, especially the scale of them. There is so much to look at and the objects are so detailed. Something on this scale would probably be too ambitious for me but I could still aim for it.

Jedediah Caesar http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/jed_caeser.htm?section_name=abstract_america_painting_sculpture

This work really jumped out at me as unique and innovative. It does deal with containment, but in an alternative way. Here the artist has taken various scrap or discarded materials and embeds them in white or black resin. He then cuts into the block to create interesting cross sections. In one piece these chunks are then arranged on a wall into one giant slab of resin and cross sections. In another a cube is cut out from the larger block, which also shows the cross sections of the scrap materials very effectively too. Although this is containment aswell, you do not get the same feeling that the objects inside are precious. They feel frozen in time but also the complete opposite of precious because they are basically destroyed in this process. By being glued and suspended in opaque resin and then sliced into pieces, it is now impossible to get back the original objects.

I also decided to have a general look around the Internet for some interesting pictures or ideas to do with glass bottles, containment and things like that to help me with some more direct inspiration for my project.

(Akinobu Izumi)

This artist puts all sorts of things in tiny bottles, not just ships.

Paula Hayes

I originally found this artist a few years ago but it wasn't very useful. I'm so glad I remembered it for this project.

Litill

This artist's work is very similar to the previous one. However, these terrariums are much more dry and arid. They feature cacti and sand rather than lush shrubs and dirt. This is a really nice idea, but because of the narrow necks of the bottles I currently have, this would be virtually impossible. Unless I switched to glass jars, or some other glass receptacle instead.

So, I'll hopefully be getting on with some ideas linked to this research I have done. I cleaned out the two bottles that I put those magazine pictures inside. I also get two more bottles, and made corks for two of them because they had screw tops. I think this makes them look a little more uniform, even though they are different shapes and obviously different sizes.

I'm also looking into perhaps getting some more bottles of different sizes, then I will have a wider choice and other bottles might look better together.