Love, love LOVE the newest series of Reliquary sculptures…! I am not finished with the "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden" series. Even while I continue the adventure of the latest series, I have ideas stirring for the next series of big reliquary sculptures and can hardly wait to continue creating these buggers! The scale of the sculptures is necessary – integral actually. The size, however, does create its own set of challenges. I can’t just ship the sculptures off to art shows willy nilly and potential collectors need to have a certain amount of space before acquiring a sculpture. From my soul’s perspective – the sculptures just MUST be created. From the business perspective - I don’t doubt places and collectors for these sculptures exist but while I take steps to get the sculptures out into the world, it has dawned on me that perhaps some smaller explorations of each series would be productive for my creative process and for practicality of exhibiting and selling. Most of the art I have collected is very small - a reflection of my art buying budget and the small space I live in.
Can I work small? Well of course…! Actually in college I worked mostly in jewelry-size scale because I couldn’t afford materials to work larger while putting myself through school. Two summers ago, a girlfriend gave me a BIG stack of small boxes. The boxes determined the scale of this new mini series.
Last summer I experimented with wood creating pieces to fit the boxes but I wasn’t enchanted or intrigued. Maybe because I wasn’t using the right quality of wood to carve on such a small scale but then too – carving wood takes oodles of time whether working big or small. I wanted to work fairly swiftly both as a contrast to the labor intensive large reliquary sculptures and to keep cost down for potential collectors. I kept my eyes and ears open to ideas of other materials to use.
Long story short; here’s a peek from yesterday’s time in the studio: