In a continuous battle with a sculpture I made in my last university term I have been trying to assess what it is about the characteristics of this object which made it difficult to deal with. It is awkward, dark and dense but yet hollow and lightweight, its metallic yet representing natural forms. It is, self admittedly, all together very odd. However in a conversation with cuator Richard Parry about my work, he identified the notion of scale regarding this sculpture. Describing how it is not quite human sized or large scale, yet is also not small or weedy makes it difficult to comprehend and relate to, however this something which makes it succesful as it furthers the confrontational aspects of the objects.
Discussing this further with a tutor, I was directed to a sculpture by Ron Mueck called 'dead dad'. This sculpture demonstrates the significance of scale in sculpture. By making a hyper-realistic sculpture of a full grown male body but scaling it down to almost child sized the sculpture gains a new understanding than had it been presented in real size, it challeneges our preset ideas and judgements on the sizes of familiar objects and forms.
This is also seen inversely often in large scale sculpture where small objects are scaled up.
However I feel that for my sculpture I feel that the odd middle ground between these two approaches is suitable as my sculptures become difficult to place into catergories making them difficult to comprehend which is something I intend to draw upon more for my final exhibition. I feel that this we offer myself a visual language to use to interpret the complex ideas about nature and the landscape which I wish to address.