Float / hover

Float

/ hover

Early work

Still under de•re•construction

Floating

My first serious study - besides model studies etc. - at the Rotterdam Academy of fine arts, was the work for an assignment from the 'plastic morphology' class, where we worked with clay only.

'Hover ' was the notion I added myself, to express my ambivalent considerations with this study.

Clay is an easy to shape, but rather heavy and lump substance. To express something like 'lightness' or 'floating', as the assignment intended, is an almost impossible task.

Of course, like anybody else, I tried to shape forms that would as closely as possible express the desired notion.
But after some time of sketching and rudimentary experiments, I didn't think it was possible really to ask that much of this particular material.

Trying to define which properties of an object would give the impression of 'lightness' or 'floating'.

At the very best one could achieve a faint approximation of the concept - at least to my opinion - 'the closest a sculptor had come to a sense of lightness with clay, is the classic example of the 14 year old ballet girl from Degas'.

I actually made this in clay but - i have to admit: not without a sense of shame - it didn't work out very well. Though the idea was to use the background / foundation of the clay ball / as a feature to obtain the 'floating' sensation, it was as if the object could collapse any moment.
(original photography lost over the years)

As a last resort I tried figurative representation: the form of a hand, standing on the middle finger.

Unfortunately it just wouldn't 'hold' at a small 1:1.5 size, no matter what framework I used to strengthen the construction: clay simply was the wrong material to make such a form.

But if I would represent a figurative form in clay, I also could represent the clay in an other technique:

'Float / hover'

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