Soap Carving

Given a nail and an ordinary block of Ivory Soap, we were asked to make explore subtraction as we carved the soap. In the end we were asked to create a 24″ by 30″ tone drawing of the result. I can say that this one day project helped me not with carving soap, clearly, but with drawing with rigor. This was the first time I had attempted to draw realistically, and the first creating a tone drawing of any kind.

Many into One, One into Many

Perhaps one of my favorite parts of Summer Studio was this competition to wrap up the summer. The assignment was given, as usual, as a letter sized page with one sentence in the center. “Turn many into one, and one into many using nothing but a sheet of 24″x30″ material.” Hmm. No glue, no tape, no additional materials. I struggled with this greatly, as our professors often gave ambiguous assignments as a way to free us from constraint; that freedom became the cause of countless hours in the studio.

I reverted back to one of my initial ideas after a night pursuing the concept, staggered folding. Through an offset fan fold, I could create very compelling curved forms, many lines becoming one curve. The project had a second layer of meaning as well. By coloring the edges of each side differently, one could witness many lines of one color converging on a point, then back into many lines of a different color.

The final arrangement was made with an assortment of pieces with varying curves, shapes and sizes. Many have pulled parallels to the Sydney Opera House’s three shells, however this is entirely coincidental, the nesting seemed a natural way to bring focus to an object with little of its own.