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The set up for assessment. Seeing it all together and reflecting on the work now, I am happy with the direction that I have gone in with it. I began with ideas around interdependence in nature, how everything is connected to each other, because I wanted to expound the importance of this to people in a visual way so that it could be felt - that was the seaweed and the web - however this idea broadened over the weeks as I thought more about the reasons and feeling behind why this is important to me, why I think it's so fundamental to how we should understand our lives and our relationship to world - existence.

My interest in the human the figure comes from a deeper interest in understanding human life, and the visual of the figure most strongly resonates as what can bring us to contemplate this to me - to question our conscious experience as either emergent from the material world, the view that I lean toward, or as fundamental to the world as matter. So understanding the plurality of possible consciousnesses, or aspects of what constitutes different types and degrees of consciousnesses, is essential to understanding life. In either case I want to depict the body as of the earth, made of earth-stuff which will reconfigure itself into other forms and other beings in the cycle of life. Hence, the body is geological.

To see ourselves in this context also brings more immediacy to our relationship with the land, cultivation and technology. Questions around dwelling, locality and resource use arise here, and further, the problems of historicisation and power. This line of thought is where I want to go with my work in the future.

I'm not sure how much of this thought has been evident in the work here, but it is not so much these exact thoughts I want to stir in people as it is to share with people this feeling I have of connectedness with earth/existence and an openness to the building of new ways of connecting with being itself which may orient how we live.

Done in the last few minutes of setting up for assessments because I had lots of spare branches, I'm glad I could find something to do with this figure. I prefer the mixture of the materials rather than an only paper figure and it also raises it into a good position

Comparing it back to the original idea I'm very glad that I didn't simply go with this (although I would still like to make this)

It's not the most amazing piece ever but with all the different directions I went with it I think I've learned the most about how I should approach sculpture through this piece from the 6 weeks. To have that reflexivity, and also on a technical level how I want to balance detailing anatomical features with significations of form, masses that create the sense of a human body rather than a literal body. It's not that I wanted to make highly detailed figures - the picture above is very much just a mass of form - but that I feel my approach to getting there was too concerned with the interior or features before the form

Also learning how I should approach layering materials, how to work with the material, to give yourself over to it, and make solid foundations to work from

In Sharon Griffin's figurative sculptures I love how the branches are entwined with the bodies and I would definitely like to explore this more in future, perhaps in hempcrete

And organic objects and forms in Anna Gillespie's art

It was Aisling's idea that instead of putting the canvas inside the length of the branch that I instead lay it on the ground as a sort of shadow. I prefer this because the gap of the branch is what makes it an interesting shape and it places it within the space better, especially with the rock. I have little to say on it but it's neat and a good way to display these loose ends

I didn't get to the wood carving I had hoped to unfortunately but had this spare piece lying around. I didn't have time to make a relief carving but this sort of sketchy scuffing up of the surface with the carving knife and wet charcoal was fun

(it's a person sitting if that isn't clear)

Tuesdays little exhibition

The drawing was made partially by looking at the branch structure and partially by trying to draw it's sort of essence to me which charcoal with its airy lightness made sense for, in how the branches are fleeting and sway. The picture is of the branch in front of the seaweed, edited in procreate, I wanted to change its character to create something new out of it - it's better on screen

The set up. Taking better pictures with my camera. I placed the branches in front mostly for visual interest but also because I was initially going to cut the canvas up and stitch it into the spaces, and photographing it behind it is in the same ballpark

Finished laying the stuff down on the canvas. Laid out flat you can see the layers of the food chain here, the seaweed produces energy by photosynthesis, the sea snails eat the seaweed, mussels are filter feeders that eat plankton and algae on it, crabs like hermit crabs are omnivores which eat both seaweed and predate on the mollusks. The bones are of a bird which are at the top of the chain and eat the crabs.

Second ballyvaughan trip to get materials

The land art movements, earth art, environmental art etc, especially where they began in the 60s and 70s often times feel disconnected from the land they're on to me, and didn't truly achieve distancing themselves from gallery commercialism. They still have lots of value though and I like Andy Goldsworthy's art especially

I'm unsure about what the best way to display the balancing branches would be for example if I put it in a forest, and the problem is not in the art itself most of the time but in how it's conceptualised, where problems about humanity's separation from the rest of nature in western culture run into our thinking about art in the land.

The chalk horses in England are a great example of earth art to me, replenished by the community, they're living pieces of art thousands of years old

Finally brought the branches in which I had planned to use for the seaweed canvas, to cut it up and stretch it loosely in the gaps of the winding shapes, however I first wanted to photograph them and as I was doing so I realised they can balance on each other very easily to create this tall structure, which I saw as a figure of sorts, and much of the ideas surrounding the dirt body influenced this in how masses of form signify anatomy rather than being anatomical. It's very fragile as nothing is holding it together which I like very much, the fleeting nature of life

Kalina for scale.

Trees are excellent sculptural things, in form obviously but also in how they carry their memory in their structure. Giuseppe Penone's art deals with this and is an artist who I think deals with the subject of nature, the body, and how life is interlinked in a very well developed way.

I would really like to make site specific art, art that is in a forest and made out of things in that forest, and I'd like to leave it there and let things grow on it, moss, lichen, bugs to crawl on it, fungus to colonise it, and for it to decay over time. It would also be interesting to bring it back into a gallery environment after things have grown on it but ultimately I want (some of) my art to be impermanent, or change.

Penone's work

Grass growing in my guy! Life and death cycles in nature, a sort of reconfiguration of a figure (plant bodies are just as interesting as human bodies ok!). At this point I was starting to dislike the piece though and drifted away from the initial idea of simply recreating the moss body I saw in those pictures, and conversations with mike and sarah helped me to think more flexibly about it.

Simply photographing the objects next to or on helps me to connect how these kind of disparate things I have made relate to each other or what I might do with them. The leg against the seaweed conjures ideas of something washed up on the shore, like dolphin carrion.

Also placing the body into what is essentially a landscape, or framing the photo as if it is itself a landscape, brings out the idea I'm trying to convey about our relationship to earth, which is a cosmological question. I often say the body is a geological thing when trying to explain the art I'm making which is a very abstract sounding statement but I say it because it encompasses so much and I want the viewer of the art to feel embedded within geological time, oneness and selflessness and so on.

I had originally planned to display the body suspended horizontally in twisting branches somewhat similar to Laurence Edwards Thousand Tides figure, also somewhat inspired by neolithic defleshing structures, which didn't pan out but I still wanted to raise the figure off the ground, and balance as an idea itself was becoming increasingly important to me, so I made this little thing of the leg balancing on sticks over a paper cut out shadow of it. Essentially I still wanted to express the ideas and feelings that raising it would give even with just the smaller parts, which by their own feel kind of ritualistic

Beginning to put stuff down on the canvas. Firstly the reason its a canvas stretched over a frame is because its double sided with dirt on the back and I thought it would be easiest to sew a needle through it if it was standing and stretched taut (although I ended up not going with this idea and it was very difficult anyway). I like artists who break down the distinctions between sculpture and painting like Anselm Kiefer or Antoni Tàpies, who Sylvia told me of and when I googled him this picture came up which must be how I looked

Process wise it consists of drying out seaweed in the drying rack, some of which I glue down, other parts I blend up to create fine, dark green pieces which I can use to cover the surface in more fully. There is also dirt mixed with pva to cover the white of the canvas, and crushed seashells mixed in with it or laid on top

Apologies for the smell

Projection drawings of the seaweed in charcoal. Projecting them at scale provides interesting compositions I might use later in other things

The gathering of materials is an important part of art-making, and it's important to me that I try bring forth the sensory experience of the environment into the art - the feel, wetness, mood (the smell too which is unavoidable) and by doing so get the viewer to engage more closely with the environment

The ecology of the shore in ballyvaughan, Clare, is the basis for my thought around the entanglement of beings in ecosystems, the webbed interactions of the biological and geological community, the webbing and branching forms of seaweed, of lichens

Starting the figure. Initially I thought I would use clay mixed with dirt and a lot of clumps of scrunched wire to suspend the moss and dirt from, however it didn't have the solidity and weight that I wanted so I began using soaked brown paper which I covered in glue to make a core on which I will later lay moss and more carefully sculpted dirt. I'm incorporating the dirt at this stage because I want the layers inside the figure to be partly visible in places in the finished piece, and to have the freedom to be able to reveal different parts later on if I wish

Modelled after jagoda

In these photos I took on keeper hill, I see human figures. In the top one which is where the idea came from, I see a person lying down (their head is on the right), branches for arms, legs, and an exploding plant growth from the neck.

Much dirt and moss to be collected.

Laurence Edwards!!!

A bronze sculptor concerned with the human form, specifically the male body, portraying some sense of doubt, or apprehension in its expression in his recent work, and our relationship with nature and history. The neolithic feeling of his art, that subtle emotion is what I want to bring forward into my sculpture.

He also incorporates natural materials like leaves, branches, and twigs into his figures. The looseness, you can see where the clay has been smeared on by fingers, is great and I want to treat my figure with the same looseness and flexibility.

These lying sculptures in particular are an inspiration for the mud/moss body. The pose with the head slightly up, which he took from Masaccio.

He's said working on these feels more like a doctor treating a patient than sculpting

Rembrandt (or me sculpting this guy)

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