It is four am and I have been lying in bed for the past hour thinking about why I am having such trouble with my cardboard sculpture project. Once I started to organise the words into a coherent structure, the answer was obvious.
Cardboard doesn’t have any soul.
It has had the life force machined out of it, the process of industrial refinement has removed any echo of the tree that once was there. The violence of the process has shattered the music into unrecognisable shards of sound.
Cardboard is a dead material to me. I cant hear its song.
I didn’t realise until just this minute, that is what I had been trying to do. I had been trying to listen to a song that wasn’t there. I had been trying to work intuitively with a material that was incapable of telling me what it wanted me to do.
Trying to catch a glimpse of the path has been an exhausting process. I have been incapable of true thought, the echo of nothing has been almost overwhelming and the white noise has been deafening.
My attempts to create anything have been ineffectual.
Simple solutions such as needing to cut a slot into the cardboard so that it will sit flush with the line of the railing, have been almost impossible to realize.
I have been unable to properly explain my ideas and this failure of articulation combined with my ineffectual problem solving has added to my frustrations.
But, a throw away line that I used in the class debrief at the end of yesterdays session, has coalesced into a practical solution to my problem and I think I know what I am going to make. Now that I have realised that I can’t work intuitively with cardboard, I have developed some momentum again.
And with these words gone from my head and given to you, dear internet, I am going back to bed.
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Beautifully worded post! And you hit the nail on the head – “It has had the life force machined out of it”
Thanks April 🙂 xox
Try covering it with plaster bandage, suddenly soul.
Or you could go here for inspiration.
http://handeyemagazine.com/content/love-and-other-audacities
Thanks for the link Trace. The unit I am doing is an introduction to sculpture and we are only allowed to use cardboard and glue. Nothing else. It is a site specific project and the work will only be up for an hour or two.
How’s your work going?
Are you allowed to burn it?
Put holes in it?
Slash it and peel it if it corugated.
My work, ha, I just spent a fortnight fast tracking a piece of work for an exhibition and just realised it is too big.
Very annoying.
x te
I can cut it, put holes in it, slash it and peel it Trace and I might jut burn it once the instal is over and done with.
Oh No. Do you have enough time to make another piece? I had to set up my exhibition on a Thursday last week and only fired the kiln on the Monday afternoon. I was cutting it very very fine.
Waiting to see your solution to the absence of soul. Which I agree with, but surprisingly I believe that some papers (hand made) do have soul. Inconsistent that’s me. Paper is also a loooong way from the tree/bush/shrub it began life as.
I hear you, I understand what you are saying. That horrid shiny stuff in the dollar shop notepads is as soulless as the cardboard I am using. But good quality paper is simply lovely ( and smells so nice as well)
I’m not an artist and sculpting would be way beyond my imagination. The only time I find cardboard to have any soul is when it has something wonderful contained inside, sitting on my doorstep just waiting to surprise me! Then I just want to hug it! Good luck with your project.
I’m with you Kathy – the only cardboard with a soul is that parcel waiting on the door step 🙂
Speaking of parcels, thanks for the ‘I believe in Tigers’ t-shirt link Kim 🙂 I’m got a shirt on its way in the mail.
Excellent news Marita.
Oh, yes, you’ve nailed the soul-sucking illness pervading our world…that cardboard (and many other similar materials) are deader than doornails.
Me i’d be making cylinders and filling them wih torn cardboard flowers.
Yes. Absolutely.
In fact I’d render the material further in abstract, anthropomorphic terms, like, ‘cardboard is incapable of love’.
And it’s true! When did cardboard ever throw a decent dinner party, hold a simple conversation or even say, ‘Hello’? Kim, I’ve actually seen cardboard just sit there and… wait for it… ignore me! Yup. Cardboard is up there with plain paper and a pencil… impossible to write a poem with such soulless material. 🙂
Could you fashion it back into a tree? As a tree it had soul, it could remove CO2 and make O2, provide shade, make seeds, feed and shelter birds, and eventually decompose into forest floor litter, ferment into humus, help other creatures live. After it’s cardboard-tree life is over, you could put it back outside to return to nature! Henry David Thoreau wrote in 1842, “Nature doth thus kindly heal every wound. By the mediation of a thousand little mosses and fungi the most unsightly objects become radiant of beauty”.
Oh Janet, You do make me smile, thank you. I do like Thoreau. One of the other students has made a beautiful flying swan that she is going to give me and I want to hang it in a tree here and document its return to nature.
There are lots of lovely lines and angles within the building and I really want to replicate the lines and reflections that I see as well as see if others can see what I see. I think that is part of my struggle. It will all be over by next Thursday and I will write about the outcome on the Friday.
Off topic, I found an unsent christmas card to you and David under the front seat of my car.
Thanks, Kim,
Off topic…send it this year! Also thanks to the folks who recommended the book Indelible Ink in your blog or Veronica’s. Our library couldn’t find it in the Capewide libraries or elsewhere nearby, so they ordered it and I just finished reading it. Loved it!
I will try to remember to post it this Christmas but I wouldn’t hold my breath. I think the book recommendations were probably on Veronica’s blog 🙂
can you soak the cardboard and shape it that way? i can see your problem, especially after working with something as powerful as clay. xt
Thanks Tracey but the project doesn’t allow for altering the cardboard that way. The task is for us to respond to the site and then construct a sculpture realizing that response. We can chop the rotten stuff up any way we like. I want to make something elegant and I am struggling with the restrictions the material imposes on me as well as fighting my own nature.
Good points. This will be a good experience, if only for the learning.
I’m curious now about what you will evventually make. Please post a picture for us.