Thing-a-day.com

the slightly menacing result of being left alone in a room with clay and nails.

http://flickr.com/photos/23386160@N08/?saved=1

Title: Flutter by
Description: Butterfly sculpture - wire frame with nylons & acrylic paint
Inspiration: This day in history, nylon was patented (1937)

This little aluminum wire man does Tree Pose (Vrksasana) all day long.  He even balances all on his own.

He’s standing on the Buddha for good measure. And his form isn’t so good…
Aluminum wire is now officially my least favorite wire. It just breaks a ton, doesn’t have nice bend properties, dirties the hands.  That must be why I had some left over & sitting around… this guy is light on his foot though.

I know this might be a little questionable, but hey, I’ve had a rough week!

Blogged at greetingarts.typepad.com.

This elephant headed figure is my Day 4 creation. the wood is from Philadelphia and he reminds me of Ganesh. Maybe he has magical powers to remove obstacles! He’s only about 2 3/8″ tall.  Here’s another shot of him.

So I really like Arthur Ganson and I just wanted to play with some wire and maybe one day get to making a wire machine. You can see the potential for the crank/handle for turning. It’s about 8 inches tall and 4.5 inches wide without the crank. Wire is incredibly fun to play with.

My son, Spud, had a flyer from school about making ‘bread clay’…that is clay out of stale white bread, glue, and food coloring. So we tore up three slices of bread into tiny bits, added three tablespoons of white glue (which had been colored with some candy-coloring), and then kneaded the Sam Hill out of it. It turned into this mushy mess…let it stand for ten minutes or so, and then it’s soft but not sticky. Form into a ball, squish, make head, legs, and tail, decorate with circles, and voila! Bread clay turtle!

(I didn’t post yesterday, but I actually made TWO things yesterday — that loaf of white bread, and the signatures for an upcoming journal project. YAY!)

Part of a sculpture, done in Moleskinnie stained w/ tea. Done the first; just couldn’t get on here to get it up till the last minute.

So, February 1, 2008. Second month of the year and first day of this challenge. Feeling inspired by my friend’s really nice nature photographs from yesterday I took to the great outdoors for today’s create-a-thing. I wanted to, in the spirit of Andy Goldsworthy, create something that interacts with the natural environment. Being on a university campus in a large city, I thought it appropriate to engage the human “footprint” with the concept of beauty or creation or . . . What emerged was this little design, left inconspicuously on a seldom-traveled set of stairs near a big campus cafe. Perhaps in a couple days I will check back in to see what remains and if anybody has taken notice. Some notes:

1. I tried not to think about what I was making or put any meaning into it. The important thing was to just sort of go with what form I felt was necessary.
2. Perspective is always key - I had to continually remind myself what I was doing this for because it was so easy to let my mind run away with it/over think it.
3. Scotland is really cold in February. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll find something to do a little closer to my front door (like, behind it)!