it must be really easy to be an artist...
i mean if i can have MY work displayed at the national gallery of australia, then how hard can it be really?
jokes.
my artwork.
this semester i am taking my second unit of arts education (how to teach art in primary school)...
part of our major assignment was to create a conceptual art piece and display it at the national gallery...
we needed to be influenced by the gallery and/or its surroundings in some way and use materials that students in a classroom could access and/or ones that were recyclable or came from nature.
making the globe - one half.
i decided to make a hanging globe that represented earth and wrap pipe cleaners around it...
the written statement/explanation that accompanied my piece goes like this:
"The idea behind the artwork began to come together after researching artist Clement Meadmore who lived as an expatriate in America from age 34. His artwork, displayed at the National Gallery of Australia, ‘Virginia’ is named after and dedicated to fellow expatriate and artist Virginia Cuppaidge (National Gallery of Australia, 2010).
Whilst standing next to this artwork I was able to look out over Lake Burley Griffin, named after its American designer, Walter Burley Griffin, and see the National Carillon and the Australian-American Memorial (Harrison, 1983). The Australian-American Memorial, which was constructed in the 1950s, was made to express gratitude for American help given to Australia in the Pacific War (Australian Government, Department of Defence, 2004). The Carillon was a gift from the British Government to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the nation’s capital (Australian Government, National Capital Authority, 2011). Gathering this knowledge of the many global influences on the environment surrounding the artwork ‘Virginia’, seemed to make the fact its creator and namesake were expats more relevant then I had previously considered.
I wanted to create an artwork that encouraged viewers to think of the world as a whole, rather than as separate continents and also about their own role within that. To do this, I eluded to Earth using a hanging spherical shape made from paper mache. I chose not to represent the continents, but instead to cover the globe in aluminum foil, which gave it a reflective property with the intention of encouraging viewers to see themselves in the piece. The wire pipe cleaners wrapped around the globe provide a visual representation of the unity of the globe and the connectedness of all of Earth’s inhabitants. The placement of the artwork between Meadmore’s piece ‘Virginia’ and Lake Burley Griffin, The National Carillon and the Australian-American Memorial, is done in the hope that people viewing the works will be prompted to think about global influences on the area as I did on my initial visit to the gallery."
hanging globe.
i really hated this assignment in that i felt it had very little relevance for my future as a teacher...
so i made it a little more fun for myself and while i was making the paper mache ball i filled it with chocolates...
when i got home from presenting at the gallery, i grabbed a broom and i beat the artwork to a pulp, before sharing all the yummy chocolates with my friends!
filling with chocolate.
:)
xx
