Sculpting with Lard

Since my tutorial with the artist Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, I have been wanting to revisit my experimentations making lard sculptures and push them further. It wasn’t really appropriate at the time to colour the lard, as I wanted my work to be purely from the internal. I now want to experiment with embracing the aesthetic aspect to my practice, by using paint once more.

I did my body mapping once more, where I felt and explored my body with one hand, and manipulated the lard with the other hand. For the piece below, I put the sculptures on a piece of Perspex so that the piece could be viewed from all angles. This again relates to my subject matter. I found a certain irony in that internal feelings cannot be seen at all, but this piece can be seen from every angle.In between each colour, I washed my hands and went back to my body mapping, in order to connect with my internal feelings once more, then chose a colour which I felt was most appropriate for the part of my body I was focusing on at that time.

After doing this, I realised to my disappointment that the piece looked fairly similar in shape and form to some other sculpture I have made, so I started to think how I could develop/change this piece in a way which was different and exploring something new.

Therefore, I decided to use another piece of Perspex to squash the piece, which made the piece take on a whole new aesthetic.This is something that I definitely want to experiment with more, in terms of adding other lard components to the sculpture inside to make the squashed piece more intricate, as well as experimenting with the installation of the pieces in the gallery space.