Research in Practice

12/12/19

The Research conducted today was studio time working with metal as well as some reading. For my studio work, I cut out 9 12" wide Bison silhouettes out of 16" gauge sheet metal with a plasma cutter. One thing that I took away from this was more comfort and experience working with the plasma cutter. It's still a new tool to me.

The reading I conducted was an article by Will Nettleship called Public Sculpture as a Collaboration with a Community . It covered his process when approaching public sculpture, and hinted at site specificity and cultural/ historical relevancy to the topics dealt with in public sculpture. One of the things I took away from this was that I recalled Duncum's 7 principles and engagement with postmodernism as a contemporary practice. It made me think about the signifier/ signified relationship in art, and that made me reconsider all of the various animals. I think I want to stick with just two different animals as signifiers, bison and cattle. I think that the comparison of them as well as the greater number of them indicates more of a heard concept that shows the change over time as herds of bison, once the dominant, large prairie animal, have been replaced through agriculture and industry by herds of cattle.