Post 12: Sculpture as drawing out loud

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I was thinking about–or, I actually made a note to think about–the fact that a lot of the things I’m currently making are planned out, plotted out, started in a notebook. I work on them flatly, small-ly, without the dimensionality that they end up with. (A dimensionality I often feel unsure about...)

Some of the objects I’ve made that begin as notebook drawings get to the point where they feel “figured out” in this drawn stage, and then are simply (do I dare say "simply"?) constructed three-dimensionally in order for them to actually exist. (Why make something in order for it to exist? Or, why do I want these figured-out ideas to “exist”?) I think I’ve been feeling a little…something…strange?...about these objects coming to be what they end up being only in the final stage of the process of their making. It seems that their finished selves convey much more permanence than they should, considering most of their becoming took place in a different form. It has felt to me that the final objects--I’ll call them “sculptures”--are like something being read out loud; my drawings are like pieces of writing that have been fully composed, the reading of which puts what's already there into another form. The drawings are like writing that gets performed as sculpture. In this way, a “sculpture” is less like an invented thing in itself than it is like the live performance of a script. It's made from something that has already been sorted out and decided upon, and, in being built, it becomes a more visible (how similar is this to more audible?) version of its material. It becomes a more articulated version of itself.


A three-part question:

-Like something read out loud or like reading something out loud? Is a sculpture like a drawing that is/was read out loud by virtue of it being made, or is a sculpture the continual reading out loud of a drawing? When does the reading take place?


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