Found Objects Sculpture: the beginning of changing my mind for everything

                Not quite ready for another concentration piece, It was nice to go back to a Breadth piece. Embracing nature, we went out on a scavenger hunt to find interesting things in nature. Making a pack with ourselves, the four of us agreed to challenge ourselves beyond the bird sculptures we saw as examples. We let loose and grabbed anything that seemed to grab our attention. I personally had a lot of fun getting dirty and poking around at things--unearthing anything that might be useful. It amazing the weird sort of stuff you can find around the lake. We saw a tire, a ton of lunchboxes, an interesting deflated orange ball that I grabbed for later, and gathered up various branches, twigs, and leaves. When we got back to the room we went through Mrs. Ferguson's box of things and also found a lot of interesting metal objects.

As the title suggests, I changed my mind quite a few times as to what sort of animal I was going to construct. I started with the orange deflated ball as my original inspiration as got started on an exciting idea of a lion fish. I was trying to wrap thin branches around the ball to act as the stripes, but the kept falling apart and I couldn't figure out how I was going to do the tale so I started over.

Idea number two was a seahorse. I really liked the corally-ness and delicacy of this seahorse and was able to start with a little more vigour. There was these really flexible branches I had found from a bush/berry sort of plant that allowed me to get the base of some of the curves. This was what it was starting to look like:

After talking with Mrs. Ferguson about my seahorse, I realized it would be better to switch to the more iconic seahorse. Although the other seahorse had it's charm, it was a little difficult to recognize what it was. So the final idea was modified to the traditional seahorse. This was my reference:

And this served as my inspiration( also being helpful to look at the seahorse as being made of objects,and what made it iconic: namely the curling tale, s-shaped body, and snout):

So I revisited the found object bin, gathered up more of the pine needles for bulk, and was a hot-gluing machine. I found a metal screw and washer that I loved as the snout and only had to modify the other seahorse structure a little bit to serve as my base. I used a twig for the shape of the head and was able to wrap it in twine for a little bit of bulk. I added some parts of a pine-cone and then went to work attaching the piece of work to a black base, as the piece was unable to stand upright by itself. It was a little difficult, and I actually ended up having to reattach some parts of the body, as the had fallen off while I was attaching the piece to the supporting pole. I added a little bit of plant life to make it seem it was actually floating in the ocean, and viola-it was done!

Reflection:

I'm so glad Maria told me that if I'm not liking my piece to change it. I was really getting in a rut with the lionfish, and as soon as I changed it I was able to get a lot of progress. Although I did have to tweak the seahorse idea, I found I liked it a lot better than where the lionfish was headed. I realized it's ok for my ideas to evolve when my original concept wasn't working out, because otherwise I would not be making my best work and would simple be settling. This probably ended up being my favorite breadth piece, and I loved the idea of using natural objects. Bonus: I didn't end up burning myself with the hot glue as much as before!