Unmade Monuments: Exploring Public Space Through Prototyping Monuments and Public Sculptures by Twyla Exner, Assistant Teaching Professor, Department of Communication & Visual Arts
Concept for public artwork produced in VISA 2010: Sculpture 1 at TRU
Unmade Monuments asks students to be curious about how art can and does occupy and activate public spaces and the rights and responsibilities of artists and the community in relation to those public spaces. From monuments of colonial history to the “world’s largest” roadside attractions in North America to contemporary public sculpture, art in public spaces represents who and what were or are valued within culture by those with the political and monetary means to build public works.
As an assignment in the sculpture curriculum, students were asked to grapple with these questions and create a prototype for a public sculpture or monument that represents something or someone that THEY believe deserves to be represented within public space.
This project was generously supported through a TRU Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning MakerSpace Faculty Grant and culminated in a collaboration between myself, students, and the TRU Library Makerspace.
In Fall 2022 in VISA 2310: Sculpture 1, students created a handmade prototype of a monument or public sculpture, modelled out of plasticine. With the support of the TRU Makerspace, they scanned their sculptures using the Makerspace’s ExScan 3D Scanner, corrected and / or modified it using Blender (3D modelling software), and imported it as an STL file into Adobe Dimensions (digital design software) where they placed a 3D image of their monument on a 2D photograph to provide a context for their proposed public sculpture or monument.
In addition to the above-described activities, some students also printed miniature versions of their models on the Makerspace’s 3D printers as an exercise in learning the process of 3D printing and applying that process to art making.
Student Example Process
In response to the assignment, Lena Franes wanted to make a monument related to her family. She said, “I was trying to think of something interesting that has happened to one of my relatives. In the end I thought of the story of my great grandmother getting hit by lighting on her hand when she lived in McBride and had to look after her cows. She had to go out late at night and in any weather to find her cows. This story always intrigued me.”
To make her artwork, Lena started by sculpting a cow using a wire and foil armature (interior structure) and covering it with plasticine.
The cow was made just the right size to fit in her hand.
Next, she made an alginate mold of her hand and cast it in plaster.
She then placed the cow to be cradled in the hand, making modifications so that the fingers fit tightly around the cow and sculpted a lightning strike onto the hand.
She scanned the combined cow and hand at the TRU Makerspace. Lena described the scanning process as challenging due to the complexity of the sculpture, it took a few scans to get all of the details in place.
Finally, Lena 3D printed her sculpture.
For her digital rendering, Lena chose to place her sculpture at the entrance to McBride, BC, which is where her grandmother lived and cared for her cattle.
Concept for public artwork produced in VISA 2010: Sculpture 1 at TRU
Further outcomes of student projects can be seen at the bottom of this blog post.
NEXT STEPS:
In the Winter, 2023 Semester, VISA 2320: Sculpture 2 students continued to learn about 3D scanning by using the Makerspace’s new Shining 3D – Einstar Handheld 3D Scanner to convert large-scale handmade sculptures into 3D digital images.
With the award of a second CELT Makerspace Faculty Grant, myself and students in VISA 3310: Sculpture 3 in the Fall 2023 Semester will continue the investigation of digitizing handmade sculptures and explore the application of those 3D digital files through placing them in Virtual Reality environments. The intention is to place scanned 3D digital models of student sculptures into any Google-mappable environment, be able to scale that model and adjust the lighting, then navigate around the sculpture using VR, thus creating an immersive experience where students can imagine their artworks at any scale and in any place in the world.
Follow along with the Makerspace blog for more posts to come on this fun and exciting process!
INVITATION:
Were you inspired by this process? I invite you to make your own version of a public sculpture or monument of importance to you! Create your own hand-modelled sculpture using plasticine or modeling clay and then scan it at the TRU Library Makerspace to make a 3D digital model. They have a blog post about how to 3D scan, which you can access here. 3D print your 3D digital sculpture at the TRU Makerspace – if you haven’t 3D printed before, complete this tutorial, then ask staff about printing your sculpture. If you’d like to learn how to impose that 3D digital file onto a photograph, there is a good tutorial on doing so using Adobe Dimensions here (this can also be achieved in some apps, in Blender, and in a variety of other programs).
If you do follow this prompt, I’d love to see your results!
Email me: twexner@tru.ca
STUDENT OUTCOMES:
“I really enjoy focusing on mythology in my work, especially stories that my family have told me or I have learned due to my heritage. For this sculpture, I wanted to monumentalize the story of Crom Cruach (pronounced krawm croo-awk), who was an ancient Celtic God of fertility that was slain by Saint Patrick. Unfortunately, the Celts didn’t have a written language, and when Christians such as Saint Patrick abolished paganism and converted its believers, a lot of these old gods and stories were forgotten. In Christian retellings of this story, Crom Cruach was a giant serpent or leviathan that tormented his followers and forced them to sacrifice their first born child, and Saint Patrick “saved” them by killing the god, blessing the Killycluggin stone (which Crom Cruach sits on in the sculpture), and converting the survivors. Like this story, a lot of Celtic tales are told from a Christian point of view and look down upon the pagan beliefs. According to Celtic accounts, Crom Cruach was a wise old man that accepted harvest offerings for a bountiful season next year. I wanted to memorialize Crom Cruach’s lost story, along with the other gods of my beautiful but dying culture as the world continues to grow and move away from old beliefs. To do this effectively, I decided to paint my sculpture to look like an ancient bronze cast. When I think of bronze, I think of ancient works uncovered a thousand years later, such as the Greeks and romans. Crom Cruach and the Celts had been around since Stonehenge- before the pyramids, which is why I chose to depict him as something old and forgotten. If this were large, I imagine it hidden away in a forest, waiting to be uncovered.”
“While brainstorming for this project I knew I wanted to incorporate some sort of environmental message within the sculpture. I played with the idea of rising sea levels, sand that has been taken from the Sunshine Coast to be put on Hawaiian beaches, global rising temperatures, or endangered Western Painted Turtle habitats. This morphed into the plastic bag chair. The chair is placed on a beach to represent the pollution in the ocean, specifically plastic waste. If I were to make this monument life sized I would look into recycled plastics or plastic that has either washed up on shore or been retrieved from the ocean. My colour choice draw attention to the artwork to start conversations about waste in the ocean. I chose to place it in Davis Bay on the Sunshine Coast as it is one of the most seen beaches.”
“In this work, I chose the Mid-Autumn festival signal to make a monument about because the day before our first class falls during the festival. Mid-Autumn Festival is a traditional festival in China that is the moon’s roundest and brightest day of the year and signifies reunion. People often use Moon to explain this festival. The rabbit is the ancient understanding of the moon’s shadow. The Chinese usually see the Mid-Autumn festival as a day for staying with families. Because of COVID-19, I didn’t return to China to see my family for three years. The emotion of missing is the significant reason I chose this topic and created this work”.
“My piece was a reflection on the importance of pollinators and the damage man does to them vis-à-vis bombarding the environment with Neonicotinoids like Roundup and other Glyphosate herbicides. Considering bees are responsible for 1/3 of the food produced in the world, bringing attention to their plight is an important message to convey. Almost all my work is motivated by some form of socio-economical base, environmental crisis or social injustice. When given the material of plasticine and all the possible forms I could create I thought it would be interesting to do a bee motif and try to push the crisis that we as a society in a not-too-distant future will face: food shortages world-wide if our attacks on the environment continue”.
“When I think of a monument, especially one that would be important enough to me that I would want to put it somewhere it would be seen by all, I think of something meaningful. That being said, there is little in my life that is more meaningful to me than my 13 year old dachshund, Miss Bug. I only get to see her every 1-2 months when my mum can make it up for a visit and bring her, and when we were given this assignment I remember I was looking through my recent photos for inspiration. This is how I decided to make a tribute to my little silly sausage, sitting up in a signature dachshund pose”.
“For my Unmade Monument sculpture I wanted to create something which had a strong meaning to me. I chose to cover the topic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW), a topic that hits close to home for me. My family and I come from Saulteau first nations on the Moberly reserve located in treaty 8. I decided to sculpt a traditional native regalia dress which is empty: this represents the missing native women who were never given a chance”.
“When I heard the name for the assignment – ‘Unmade Monument’ — I thought of the ‘unsung hero’ and then made that theme personal in order to arrive at my idea. For the past twelve years I have been working on a feature-length independent movie, and because I am now finally close to its completion and public release, I thought I would devote a monument to the type of camera I used to capture the movie footage. The camcorder has never been considered the right type of camera to use for filmmaking — not even in the ultra-low budget world of indie filmmaking. However, this type of camera was all I could afford at the time, and I did not let this stop me from going ahead and creating the production. Therefore, the monument is dedicated to all the struggling, newbie independent filmmakers out there who have the will to push forward and make their indie movies come to life, despite not having the best equipment and barely enough money to get started”.
“Kpop or Korean pop has been a big influence in my life for the past couple years so I was enthusiastic about finding a way to fit it into this assignment. I landed on the idea of creating a lightstick, since they are an important part within Kpop (they are used at concerts to create elaborate light shows within the crowds via bluetooth connection) and already looked like a statue/monument”.
“I arrived at the idea of a frog by choosing a difficult pose to balance, then picked a human-like model, but I wanted it to resemble a frog”.
“At first, my idea was to make a substance close to the same as dew, but the more I made it, the more it looked like a star that is, like the jeweled starfish inside the Pokémon, so by this positive face in the middle of the form to make a bit of Cthulhu-like things”.
