End of an era: Feet of Clay residency ends August 2014

[This artist's statement is prepared for the artist show on August 22-24, 2014.]

Artist’s Statement (mostly accurate)

It seems impossible that a year has passed while being the Feet of Clay Artist-in-Residence. As a result of the generosity and companionship of the community, I have explored sculptural ideas pertaining to the design of ceramics, refined techniques for teaching ceramics processes to others, and documented much of my progress in photos. This exhibition displays some of the highlights of that productive year.

Overall, my design process involves overabundance and austerity at the same time. In the fertile, decadent sense, planning and designing involves a great deal of imagination and overthinking, which results in objects that are somewhat “overloaded” in the sense that they could be simpler and still be effective. More subtly, the pieces are “overloaded” in the sense in that they operate on many levels for me. In the sparse, restricted sense, often the surfaces and forms have been cleaned smooth of construction details and other evidence that handbuilding took place. As with my searching for a balance between color and form, I’m searching for a balance between overabundance and abstraction.

MOLDMAKING: A large part of my time has been spent developing ways to cast abstract ceramic designs in clay based on unusual plaster pouring techniques. In one method, I join together many flat pieces of aluminum to make close-fitting water-tight spaces. When plaster is poured into those spaces and hardens, the resulting plaster pieces can be separated and used in any combination as the mold for ceramic castings. Because the resulting cast pieces come from the same overall set of plaster sections, the finished objects I’m showing have a nice relationship to them. I can’t make up my mind whether I want the cast forms to be brightly colored or a single neutral color. I’ve shown both.

HANDBUILDING: I have also explored the abstracted geometric forms by handbuilding directly with stiff clay slabs using templates. I’m showing work that uses unglazed clay laminates on the surfaces of slab forms. I’m particularly excited to be using the five claybodies in the studio as an active but somewhat neutral color scheme. The laminates are made by stacking clay pieces together into a loaf and then making slices through the stack at different angles to reveal patterns inside.

DECORATING: As people will have noticed, I do like bright colors as well as neutrals. I spent time developing my sense of color and decoration on smooth, expanded thrown forms. I’m trying to find the right balance of calmness form and activity of decoration.

It has been a deep and abiding pleasure to meet and work among the community members here at Feet of Clay. I look forward to more, and to nourishing all the little projects I have going.

Thank you!

Generative Art Conference 2014

I've been invited to present at the Generative Art Conference in Rome, December 16-19, 2014. Here is the abstract of the paper.

GA2014 – XVII Generative Art Conference
Marc Mancuso	Mind Over Matter: Generative Concepts in Three Dimensional Sculpture (Paper, Artworks)
Topic: (Paper, Artworks)   Authors: Marc Mancuso   www.flickr.com/photos/marcmancuso   Contact: marc_mancuso@ hotmail.com	This paper discusses the effect of generative concepts on the planning, execution, documentation, and interpretation of my recent series of three-dimensional sculptures. My intent was to build systems that had both cyclic and open-ended processes from which there is no combination of fundamental design or surface evidence that traditionally identifies an objectas precursor or final product.   Metal, plaster, rubber, clay, and other commonplace sculptural materials are categorized as points on a set of continuums including rigid-flexible, absorbent-waterproof, opaque-transparent, buoyant-dense, and so on. Based on these intrinsic qualities, I build systems that manage constraints and define and implement rule-sets to regulate the order of interactions. Despite the limited use of virtual technologies, the results of these physical activities can be compared to computational and iterative processes including Boolean operations, graphical user interface tools such as fill and skew, programming structures such as loops, random number generators, and geometric identities.   Additionally, my intent was to allow any transformation to initiate or concludeanother process. Observable “links” to preceding or successive iterations may be perceptible, but traditional notions of completeness or progress towards a particular state are discarded. The physical constraints in these systems inform a discussion of successes and failures encountered during the buildingof processes that respond to these these requirements.   Of particular interest is the way in which plaster, metal, clay, and rubber are used over a series of transformations that demonstrate recursive structures, variations in high- and low-fidelity data compression, and distortion.       (1) flexible form generates unique design from sequence of metal strips  (2) liquid plaster fills all spaces for separable, closely-interlocking pieces (3) liquid clay copies one of many possible spaces among plaster pieces (4) drained, separated clay shell ready for baking, shrinking, and reusing   Documenting ongoing systems that have one or more real-time unfolding aspects and one or more physically durable artifacts raises philosophical issues as well as practical ones. The paper examines the implications of documentation through still images and time-dependent mediums.   The paper concludes with a brief discussion of how the classification systems and transformational rules could inform future work.
	Keywords: sculpture, iteration, algorithm, recursion, materials science, plaster, casting