Year 10 Visual Art- Ceramic living forms

This semester in art, our Year 10 class created sculptures out of clay inspired by living forms and responded to the themes of movement, juxtaposition or vessel. Our aim was to create a sculpture that clearly communicated our chosen theme through the use of shape, form, texture and design.

My subject matter is a sculpture of a snail with an extra element of a city and buildings on top. My aim was to respond to the theme of juxtaposition with my two components of the snail, and city scape contrasting together to create a unique and unexpected setting. My idea could be interpreted with the themes of nature and urbanisation and carrying the weight of the world. I used clay to build structure, newspaper to hold elements upright, such as the hollow shell inside my sculpture, and tools to create texture and detail such as a fork and sponge to create a bumpy figure on my slug.

Whilst the focal point of my subject matter is the snail, the sculpture combines elements of nature and living forms of my snail as well as the city scape to explore juxtaposition and the idea of urbanisation.

While creating my sculpture a challenge I had was working with different hydrations of clay, where it would be too dry to work with and would crumble my form or where it was too wet and hard to sculpt with, it was easy to trouble shoot this problem by adding more water or letting the clay sit for longer before I used it.

Overall this mastery task was really fun as I was able to respond to a theme and think creatively to build my final artwork. Sculpting the clay into a form and adding the details was really enjoyable. Creating the contrast between the snail and city helped me create a unique and interesting juxtaposition theme.

Audrey Johnson