Advanced Sculpture Tutorial: On Your Mark(s)

Course Description

Summary

Sustaining an advanced practice which elaborates on itself and sustains momentum, focusing on quantity as much as quality / narrative generation. This requires a respect for the 12 hour a week workload or more.Two examples of the objective would either result in a cohesive series of sculptures per person or one piece per person which is informed by all the former work. Each critique/project will be viewed not as an isolated chapter of creation, but as a sentence. Each step forward in a new direction builds on the last. 

Finding ways to inform each other’s work, whether through inspiration or the sharing of technical skills, will be what sets this tutorial apart from a traditional advanced practice class. Having a shared studio space will lead to a natural bleeding and overlap of processes that will lead to results and discovery not possible in an individual cubicle. 

We will design rigorous assignments for ourselves with communal material in mind, not as a strict limitation but as a scaffolding for responding to each other in the fabrication process, problem-solving/innovating in a way that is collective while not necessarily collaborative. 

We also intend to build a cumulative showing of our work produced throughout this tutorial at the end of term. This could either manifest in a gallery showing that gathers all of our individual artifacts, or potentially a large-scale and/or technically intensive collaborative sculpture.

Documentation of the learning process will be central to this tutorial. The ephemerality of avenues of inspiration is a challenge to this. We will work to pin these ideas down in digital student folders and some of it physically in the studio. We will create our own language of documentation (a butcher paper continuous scroll on the wall, a box of treasures in the corner, a Gregorian calendar and a Hal-Elsa-Lucien calendar. Sketchbook documentation, research documents, artist/reading references, critique notation, critique reflection, and portfolio updates through photo/video documentation. Intensive research in tandem with creation.

Weekly group check in between critiques to share these materials between students will be formalized as accountability for continued generation in this field. At the end of the term, the documentation will be formatted in a manner that can be added to the Bennington archives, and serve as reference for future students designing tutorials.

The faculty sponsor will participate in bi-weekly critiques as well as the one hour per week progress meetings / studio tour, and scheduled office hour appointments made individually (when necessary). 

Students will be expected to speak regularly with a variety of audiences about their work. The faculty sponsor may invite guests to critique sessions and ask students to speak with the intermediate and/or introductory sculpture classes about the work being generated in the studio.

The assessment criteria will reflect the rigor and expectations of the existing Advanced Practice course, hence the similar documentation expectations and critique setting of evaluation. We will have to tailor our critique schedule on account of our small group, but bi-weekly showings are ideal, unless somebody proposes a longer term project, in which the assessment throughout the term will focus on progress as opposed to a finished product.