Student Examples, Spring 2023

Homage To Function student examples, Spring 2023. For a closer look, click here.

The objects, above, were all made to hand scale, meaning they could be picked up and moved by hand, and are well observed at table height. They do vary in actual size, but like the Bechers' images, the image lies, and makes them appear roughly equal in size. 

Materials used in the above works vary, but in general, steel, aluminum, and cement were common. Wood and ceramic clay were also employed. The clay needed to be fired. and the student had access to that resource. In at least four of the works some welding was employed. Some was accomplished in-house, some at home, and some at other shops. With the cement, forms needed to be made, and cardboard was often used. the textures of the cardboard was imparted into the cast objects. This texture varied as widely as the source material. In a few pieces pigments or paints were used. Conceptually, the use of added surface color is discouraged because it camouflages the underlying material. Note how weathering has affected the materials in some cases. This is an inherent quality of the material and is encouraged.

 

For comparison to the Beckers' black and white collections, this work was turned into grayscale.

How does observing the work in black and white alter your perception? Removing color information limits our knowledge of the original source. For one, it ties the work tougher in a different way by limiting the pallet. Unlike the Becker collections, this group of objects only tangentially relate. They generally describe towers or vessels of some sort, but unlike the common language found in the Becker collections, there are not enough source images to find commonality among the individual sculptures. Perhaps after producing this project over 20 years, there may be enough work to start classifying pieces in refined ways.

The background and ground plane in this student collection individualize the work further. If the backgrounds of all of these were of similar tone, this may make the group appear more consistent.

Although it is an interesting exercise to compare these works based upon the collective whole, the works were not created with that intention entirely. Instead, the students interpreted the assignment from information regarding truth to materials, form following function, observations from various local building structures, and references found in the entirety of the Beckers' portfolio. And then, of course, they used their imaginations.