Student Online Exhibition
Sculpture 1 course (VISA-A320-001) at Loyola University
Professor Sara Madandar
The Material Transformation exhibition will feature art projects created by students in the Sculpture 1 course from the Art Department at the School of Communication and Design of Loyola University in New Orleans.
Sculpture 1 is a primer on non-traditional/contemporary sculpture. In this course, we worked both indoors in the studio and outdoors in Audubon Park. Students worked with space, time, structure, process, and materials. They also learned conceptualize, create, and then document their process. Through each project, we developed a growing understanding of spatial relationships in order to develop a visual and material language for three-dimensional space. One important skill students developed during the semester was to transform common objects into art. They worked with window screens, textiles, as well as nature and found objects.
After every project, they learned to document their artwork, and this documentation will be used for the online virtual exhibition. Their final project, Shelter as An Identity, was created after students had to shelter at home due to the pandemic, and they did an amazing job installing the projects in their own homes. This is especially impressive because they had to overcome the difficulties of documenting their last two projects at home with limited facilities and resources.
The artworks they are presenting for the Material Transformation exhibition are selected among five projects from our class: Window Screen, Andy Goldsworthy, Textile, Found Object, and Shelter as an Identity. Following below is a description of each project:
Window Screen: Students transformed aluminum window screens to create organic, abstract, and figurative forms.
Andy Goldsworthy: This project is mostly about process rather than a final product. They found an area in Audubon Park to build a natural sculpture. Inspired by Andy Goldsworthy’s projects, who creates ephemeral sculptures in nature, the students created sculptures made of leaves, branches, stones, flowers, or water from the lake, on site at Audubon Park and later at their backyards.
The most important part of this project was documenting the process. Some students made videos of their pieces because they were ephemeral and disappeared or degraded quickly. Others documented their work over a longer period, showing how their sculptures devolved into nature.
Textile: In this project students used their own clothes or wearable objects as a base and built their artwork by adding to it. The concept or story behind the clothing was a critical component of this project. Our focus was on the identity evoked by the clothes, which they critiqued through their own memories of them.
Found Objects: For this project, students used 2 or 3 found objects which could be man-made, natural, or even just a piece of trash. They combined these objects in such a way that they lost their original identity and function, becoming something completely new. The subject of their pieces took its inspiration from the objects they used. In opposite of the final project for the class, their concept here was created after the fact, from the object or material itself.
Shelter as an Identity: Students developed this project based on a critical questioning of the very meanings of shelter and home, thinking of the similarities and differences between these two concepts. They used materials they already had at home. Students learned how to first work on a concept, and them build an object based on it—focusing on how decision making is an important part in the process of creating art, working with limited objects and space.