New exciting ideas!

So I have been thinking a lot about the extra dimension 'location' and got some new ideas in the process. Two are directly about locations linked to consuming, but another idea is quite brilliant, but not part of this dimension. I will develop this last idea into an installation.
In the next few days I'll post some pictures of one of these ideas. All this is about real small sculptures that should work strong in large quantities, either spread out or combined.

Large quantities

Stuff in large quantities tend to be damaged, broken up, changed and thrown away. Simply economics about a not so scares product and so their low economic value. So now I suddenly have found large quantities of skulls I tend to think in the same way. Not in value, but in breaking and changing. Although, I probably add less economic value per individual skull when I use more skulls in one sculpture. [....but I don't want to be influenced by the best economical way to add value to the things I find, it should be the best creative way.]

Finding more skulls does mean I can experiment different things that require 'bulk material' and so progress, hopefully. What happens when this 'bulk material' becomes scarce again? I would probably got used to the changing, breaking and throwing. I can only take that step back if I would still appreciate making individual sculptures with just one skull.

So, I have summarised our relationship with oil by describing my relationship with sheep skulls.

Location as element

I have mainly been working on three elements when it comes to make a sculpture:
- Style; bright colours, mosaiec, Delft blue, cartoon, transformers, funny, freaky, weird, contrast
- Materials; artificial and natural; clay, plastic, wood, stones and bones.
- Me; expressed through the Freakinstyle character and his opinions.
All to form around my theme about how people value things and their systems. A few keywords of this theme are: consumerism, money, marketing, tradition, group behavior and waste.

It is now time to add another, more difficult element: location. So this is about the locations associated with my theme. The problem is not to get to abstract while adding a less tangible element like this. You could think of places like:
- Billboards (marketing)
- The estuary (waste)
- Banks (money)
- Football (group behavior)
- Farm (tradition, but also start of the supply chain)

I am not against consuming or any of the above, I want to add a critical message to how we value things around us. This mostly happens without really thinking and with unlimited trust and belief in others; mainly companies and the systems of which they are part of.

More than meets the eye

I finally finished the sculpture I was working on in March! It is an Transformer in the style of the old 80's cartoon. In that way it is sort of a Pop-art sculpture, but I have tried to bring it further by using a sheep skull suggesting it transforms out of a sheep skull. The original thought was finding a real life character like that on one of my fellrunning trips.

Design

This character is a mix of the Transformer characters of Cliffjumper, Ratchet and Jazz. I originally started making this sculpture to make it actually transform out of the skull by using all kinds of joints, but the kept breaking. I mightdo another attempt with the experience I have now, but the robot would look less cool, because I would have been a lot more limited in the design to fit it in the skull.

Connection with artist statement

More than meets the eye is about the hidden agenda of commercial organisations, an agenda we consumers forget to often and makes us believe in them and create this consuming religion we see now. The agenda is actually not hidden, if we use our heads we know that these companies aren't for charity and just want our money, but we seem to have forgotten this and have unquestionable believe in them. Time for some healthy paranoia when we buy something. Why Transformers? This cartoon was the first of television programme that had one goal; selling toys instead of making a cartoon. The toys existed before the cartoon and where made by a Japanese company. Eventually an American company took over and used the cartoon as advertisement for the toys. I loved the toys as a child and still do. I think this was quite an innocent way they used marketing tools, but marketing tools are getting increasingly unethical. They know exactly with which words they can make us think the sell good quality, but because those words have a wider meaning than our own association, they can sell lower quality with us feeling good buying it. For example, the word 'fresh'. We mostly associate fresh with, something just harvested. When they write 'freshly made' we still think the end product is fresh, but was actually made when it still was fresh and than they put it in a freezer for half a year. More than meets the eye!