Trespass (Ceramics Fall 2022)

Sculpture #5: Media (White Mountain - Genesis)

Trespass

 

            Trespass is my interpretation of the song White Mountain by Genesis.  The song tells a tale about a fox, Fang, who trespasses on a wolf pack’s sacred ground to gazed upon the crown of their gods.  Fang is caught doing this by the wolf king, One-Eye, who then delivers justice on Fang after his lengthy escape proves futile.  The song is tense and fast paced, the guitar chiming ominously and frantic organ building layers of sound, giving the feeling of a dense snow covered forest and the resolve of Fang when he realizes his demise is inevitable.  The song itself is incredibly descriptive, but in only containing so many words, somehow also contains a certain amount of ambiguity as to what actually happens.  However, this piece was not about giving a perfect interpretation but to capture the mood of the song.

            In this scene, I depict the climax when Fang realized that he cannot escape from One-Eye, who is said “never flees in the face of his foe,” and braces himself for his punishment.  I wanted a clear distinction between Fang and One-Eye, giving them unique color schemes (red and blue) and different positioning (Fang being tense and upright with fear, One-Eye sprawled with confidence).  Whatever the background may be I knew it must be mostly white, seeming as the setting is a white mountain, and I decided on Greek columns in a post and lintel style to add height to the piece and allude to sacred ground.  Completely by coincidence the presence of columns mirrors those in the album cover, though my reasoning for picking them was unrelated and I even forgot there were columns present until listening to the song again for this response.  The rocks surrounding the columns were to help pad out the space and push my circular composition, and I left the coloring ambiguous as to whether the rocks are snow or crumbles of more ruined columns.

            Creating Trespass gave me a chance to put my developing skills of making many separate pieces that combine into one, a technique used both for avoiding one fragile piece in a complex shape and for portability/storage of the pieces.  I also focused specifically on exploring strong shape language in the piece, emphasizing certain parts of the characters and background while keeping the shapes simple.  Creating a loose scene without a base really allowed for the characters to be the focal point while still providing enough structures to tell the story.  Though it would have been nice to add more to the background, like trees or more rubble, I am content with what ended up in the final product.  In the future, I would be greatly interested in doing more pieces in this style with a less structured background for the characters to explore and really just more character work in general.

Future Me Thoughts (Spring 2024)

Yeah this piece is almost entirely self-indulgent... what can I say?  Really though, this piece reveals how much music does inspire my pieces in general, most the time it's not this obvious but I am ALWAYS listening to music and pulling theming and stories from it.  Artists are always pulling from other media to make their craft and that cycle is very compelling to me... no two people interpret or pull from the same thing the same way.  It's nice to work on something where the hard details and ideas are already worked out for you and you just have to focus on execution.  As I mentioned, it was great to be able to play with static figures to tell a story with minimal background, it pushed my creative muscles.  For the record though having listened to the song more, I think Fang is actually also a wolf who betrayed his pack, not an outsider (oops).  You live and learn I suppose!

WIP PHOTOS

The temple construction was pretty simply, just more slab building (and much sponge stuffing to ensure it didn't collapse in the early drying stages)

A tad surprising on how I have little record of the fox's tail, but considering how much frustration that thing caused me I understand.  The entire fox is actually hollow, and trying to attached a bushy tail that his also hollow was not fun.  I kept thinning it out too much and then having to start over...

I opted to weather the temple pieces to disguise how lump they were and add some character

This better showcases how many parts he was.  He does need some putty to be displayed without fear of falling apart in case of bumped tables however if undisturbed he can just sit on himself