idgonemad.net/gallery/construct/bogwoman
-Copyright2004gadiv copy.jpg "the bog woman")
This piece, the bog woman, was the final project for a Design class. The project was to Design a Floating Sculpture, to be floated in the pond of the campus water garden.
The floating equipment, currently stripped from the piece, consisted of a 20" pool floatation ring, two yards of brown fabric to obscure the flotation ring (it was pink as hell, and flowery), and then a roughly meter long wooden rod extended from below her, at the end of which was a three liter soda bottle filled with rocks and water to serve as a counterweight. This counterweight kept the piece from tipping over, and the added weight helped pull the sculpture into the water, submerging the flotation ring a good couple of inches.
The sculpture itself is built on a mannequin dress form (I needed the weight, which was more than a cast of a person would afford, not to mention I'd have had to get a chick to cast, and that's just awkward). To preserve the dress form, I wrapped it in plastic wrap, then painted a glue mixture over the wrap and applied layers of paper towel (chosen for its texture, versus, say, newspaper, which is thin and very flat). Once that was dry, a mix of brown acrylic paint was applied to everything, then allowed to dry before several coats of various enamels were sprayed over it. The final skin texture is something like paper-thin leather in feel, wrinkly and shiny, like mud.
The head was built on a standard styrofoam wig head. This was cut from the lips back to separate the head for an open mouth, and a section of the neck was cut away and relocated between the newly made jaws. A few plastic rods were embedded into the upper and lower mouth for support. I then used a grill/fireplace lighter (you know, the long ones) to flame sculpt the styrofoam head; I hollowed out the mouth more, shaped the head, deformed the nose into something more corpse-like, and then singed all over to provide a better texture for the application of other media. A silicon gel was then applied to the head to smooth surfaces somewhat, to shape the eye sockets, and to shape the mouth and obscure the support rods. The mouth, as you'll see below, has a drippy, muddy sort of appearance.
The bog woman wanders the water garden...
A vacant stare from vacant eye sockets...
More to come...
idgonemad.net
Copyright information is found here.