// Pater/Materia 1 //

Insulation foam, thread, nails

3.5’ x 3’ x 5.5’

2016

For this project I sculpted a body of stiff insulation foam and covered it with a soft texture.

When sculpting, I put myself in circumstances that incite serial decision-making. In making sculptural decisions, I feel that I first observe the conditions around myself.

My mind's first reaction to observing is to evaluate the associations made between my present circumstance back to my codex of personal experience, knowledge, and dreams.

“Any grasp of a life situation and a meaningful reaction to it … should … be regarded as knowledge”

-Juhani Pallasmaa

When I evaluate my reaction aesthetically, a preconception can appear as a vision. I view these aesthetic tendencies as a result of repetition and the general labor of creation.

“Training for a skill implies endless practice and repetition that borders upon boredom.”

-Juhani Pallasmaa

In regards to boredom, “the aesthetic eye needs to be excited by ever greater intensity or, preferably, by something new; the ideology of the eye is superlative.”

-Lars Svendsen

In drawing and sculpting, I train my hands to be skillful in order to manifest a preconception. The labor of my sculpting process induced hypnosis in its repetition.

By using my reaction and preconception to search for familiar shapes, motions, and feelings in on blank paper and in the blue and pink insulation foam, I began to understand an object in the same way I understand bodies.

“A hand lying on the shoulder or thigh of another body no longer belongs completely to the one it came from”

- Rainer Maria Rilke

This is the embodied knowledge of the hand and body, whose unconscious actions allude to the learned knowledge of the mind.

“The hand has its dreams and assumptions”

-Gaston Bachelard