2d sculpture: Incorporated

Yes, I am finally getting somewhere with my search to get an optimal combination in style, material, expression and message. ...ah and the prices of these works won't break the bank!

Ever since I noticed that I needed to express a message, I was looking for a form in which I could preserve my freaky colourful style AND telling my message about how we value things and the role of big corporations in it. So I have been focussing on the food industry. We all know food is one of the most important things we buy in life, perhaps THE most important and yet we are so careless in how we judge what we eat.
To express more with my work I have been mapping other 'dimensions' of art to use in expressing my message. Normally you start with creating the story with anything that you can use to make it visually happen. But I already had a list of demands visually and that the message shouldn't interfere with it.

So by using particular materials for my artwork I manage to send a message just by using different materials. I started with bones, which was a coincidence and soon discovered it ticked the right boxes around food (dead food source) and our mindless following (sheep). Examples are invasive species and Eco orange http://www.imsobo.com/exit.html. But still it was a bit far fetched and unclear. It was more about expressing the beauty of nature (bones and stones) in contrast to the artificial (clay/resin/manmade).

So I started using plastics to express the waste and the use of artificial food sources. That in itself had similar impact. So I combined the two and that was a bit of a search because my main base material to create, clay, suddenly only worked as an adhesive. I had to rethink how to keep my style without making the right shapes with clay. I eventually worked it out by using an earlier used technique for mosaic, like in 'Bad Enamel' http://www.imsobo.com/trail.html. And combining that with the use of other plastic materials like in 'Eye Lid' and 'Sugar Ray rabbit'. Eventually resulting in: Mr. Clean http://www.imsobo.com/trail.html

But Mr. Clean was quite a lot of work and a very fragile piece.

In a parallel thought process I created fridge magnets, where I used what I did with Delft blue ceramic paint style and plastic mosaic, but on bone. Why? The other dimension I wanted to use to express my message was 'location'. What better place to express your message about food than on a fridge?
Soon after the first magnets, I wanted to create fridge magnet sculptures. I did, but the space is limited and I didn't want them to stick out a lot.  http://www.imsobo.com/fridgemagnets.html

Now I have fused where I left Mr. Clean with where I was with fridge magnets and came up with this strong combination, 'Incorporated':

Outdoor exhibitions

I just held my first outdoor exhibition this year! What does this mean? Well, carrying up my artwork, climbing gear, camera, name plate, lunch and some clothes up on a mountain. Finding a nice spot to show my art and start creating the display.
Last year I tried something similar on Loughrigg fell, but I moved a lot and lost some of the potential interaction with walkers. So this year I want to create a more proper display that'll keep for few hours on that day. I decided to bring only work that can be hanged and looked for nice cliffs to hang them on with climbing gear. I think this works a lot better than what I did last year. I can still improve some bits. Originally, I want to have either specific poems or a description of my artwork too. I also need to think of a, not so nature intruding, way to display my fridge magnets. Some bit of metal that blends in the natural environment? Hmm...

Some pictures of my work hanging halfway up Helm crag:

Size matters!

Oh no, this isn't one of those viagra enlargement spam mail. No it is about me searching for the right size for my art related to the amount of effort I put in.
In my last blogpost I showed pictures of 'Mr. Clean'. I have now managed to keep it straight up, but it was a battle with gravity! Again I was caught by surprise how much time I spend on a standing sculpture that size. So when I want to make something like this, but bigger, I need to rethink how I create it before it becomes ridiculously time consuming.
Yes, I now have art in a lot of varying sizes from fridge magnets, which I still need to put on my website, to standing sculptures like 'Mr. Clean' and 'The Fellracer'. In the future I want to make bigger sculptures that take the same amount of time as 'Mr. Clean'. The two problems I am facing are retaining my style and how to make them, technically. Perhaps I need to learn new techniques.

For now I post some pictures of another relatively big sculpture I call 'The Flial'. Judgement weapon in the battle against mindless consuming.

Mr. Clean

I present you Mr. Clean. A sculpture I want to use for an installation about the food industry and how we weirdly have ended up mixing natural with artificial in our food causing all kinds of 'modern' diseases and waste in the form of plastic and folders. To emphasise the danger of this marketing I draw a parallel with the tobacco industry, which we used to believe that cigarettes were harmless.

Why am I holding it? Well, it is not yet finished, but visually it won't get more finished then this.

Frustrating things when learning

Yeah, it isn't all greatness. The thing is, I try to constantly experiment and within that experiment the visual aspect is always more important than the technique. So sometimes you have manoeuvred yourself in a position where you have to solve a problem in a way you have never done. Well, that's what I had yesterday. Spent hours and hours to prepare sculpt and when finished I decided I wasn't happy with it. That's the point where you have to drag yourself away and brake it up and start over instead of finishing it and regretting you left that part as it was.

This is just a small step of many to create sculptures that will have the Freakinstyle feel; funny, freaky and a bit wacky, and also will tell the background story behind it. I decided to tell that story mostly by the materials I use; human waste. Waste is a result of how we value things. The two types of waste I use are bones and plastic. They are very different forms of waste, the first we normally never see and the second we see very day. Further, the bones I collect are wasted at the beginning of the supply chain, the plastic is waste at the end of it.

So I am now making a sculpture that mixes these two a bit more than I have done in the past and it requires different techniques and different thinking about what would work visually. In this sculpture I basically use clay as an adhesive and not as a main source for creating the shape.

Hope it will work!

Are you buying what you want to buy?

Something that's on my mind and is influencing my sculptures.... big corporations and the way they work. A lot of my work is about how we value things in life and especially how this is related to our consumption. We don't ask to many questions when we buy our things and we really need to think more about what is important.
Below I have focussed on the flawed system that determines how we value things. Modern marketing has filled the gap religion left on how we value things and has now a monopoly.






Marketing Menace
These days you have big companies, that can fool people in a sophisticated way. Their clever marketeers tell you a story using the right words that build up associations that make you buy their product. No your not stupid, they have big marketing departments with highly educated people who are working full time to make you buy their products! They always try to stay just within the laws/rules, but still leave you with a feeling of 'this is unfair'.

Failing Feedback
If you do notice that they are playing with you and want to tell this....then there is an employee that says: 'Computer says noooooo...' Only the very persisted customer might get his or her boss, but with the feeling that nothing will change, so why bother next time? This corrupts the feedback system and with the quantity and quality of feedback being less, they have created an environment where it has become normal to treat customers like this. I even think that employees would protest less based on their own ethics because they are used to it as a customer and probably find it normal. Especially when the pay is very low, they tent to hire people who wouldn't care less about your customer experience.
This all creates a culture of bad customer experiences.

Market democracy?
I have always thought of the open market as a sort of democracy in which you voted for good companies by buying their products, with the exception of banks and insurers whose products are vague and difficult to compare. I would now add a lot more to it. With their sophisticated market and problematic feedback system it is really hard to vote well. This is very important, because now we only notice at the very last moment when big companies do something bad. Some companies are so big, there is a lot going on, that we  can't know what they are all up to...... until BP spills oil for example. They are even lobbying to get things organised in their favour.

Local more vocal?
People sometimes don't like villages because the social control is limiting their freedom. Yes, in villages the village community dictates the morals and ethics and that can feel a bit limiting, but they prevent what they think is wrong. A small shop in a villages doesn't have the money for sophisticated marketing. If an owner of a small local shop is fooling it's customers, the customers would tell him personally and that has a lot bigger effect, because he would either be shouted at in the street or feel it in his pocket. So, yes villages and small local shops would solve this issue, but turning back the clock would be more difficult. What can we learn from this village mechanism?

Who is Simons?
I am not a big fan of more rules or laws, they are pointless. People will always find a way around them. We have to create modern version of villages or small groups that test each others ethics. I would suggest your inner circle; friends and family. We need to learn again to give feedback to people when we think something is wrong. Simons, a important author on management and accounting, created a model about four levers of control. One of them is the importance of a belief system to keep things in control. That is what we need! With the decreasing influence of religion as a vehicle for morals and ethics, not always executed in the wright way, we need something to restore the checks and balances. If CEO's can't or won't do it, we need to be doing it where we can. I hope you will try to influence your friends if you spot unethical work behaviour when they are bragging about something unethical they did!

Sheep as a symbol

I have been using sheep bones and skulls a lot as most people of you already know. The nice thing of particular using these is that my work is also about mindless following. I want to raise awareness for the pitfalls of our society where consuming, buying, owning are the substitutes for religion. We sort of follow these marketing machines as if they would have morals and ethics as a core business, they don't. They only tell what we want to no, that we can buy this crap and deserve to own it, because the want to sell. So we follow these companies and follow others who are following them, like mindless sheep.

I also created a few Transformers orientated sculptures that express this marketing and the 'wannahave' culture. You may now that in the Transformers story there are two sides; The Autobots and The Decepticons. Now, after a discussing on Facebook, thought it would be a good time to create the third group: The Followers.

Although, it makes me also feel a bit weird, because I follow things, stuff, people on Facebook and Twitter. Maybe I'm just a sheep with a different colour?
Anyway, I am still tempted to make a transformer that actually transforms out of a real sheep skull, which I intended with this sculpture, 'More Than Meets the Eye'