My final project in Painting II, taken during my senior year at college, can best be described as a contraption. I had been working a lot with wax and loved the way the liquid wax pooled and swirled before it cooled. So I fashioned a chute out of plexi and leaned it against a stack of cardboard boxes and proceeded to pour hot wax down the slide onto the surface below. My professor walked into the studio and declared that the contraption was my final project. This surprised me since I thought it was a pile of junk I was using to MAKE art, and he thought it WAS the art.
And here we come full circle. I'm feeling drawn to go back to wax again. My current work explores the tension betweens a hands-on and a hands-off approach, so the resurrection of the wax contraption came to mind. But this time I'm going to make it like a piece of art, or at least not like a pile of junk. I still intend to use it to make pieces for the wall, but hey you never know.
Today I made a model of Wax Contraption 2.0. Life sized version coming soon.