Something is finally beginning to happen. 🙂
My American alligator is slowly taking shape, and judging by the girl’s expression, I don’t think this is going to be a particularly gentle pair. Somehow, they already seem perfectly suited to each other.
Both figures are being created at life size. The alligator will be approximately three metres long, while the girl is the size of a three-year-old child. Working at this scale has turned out to be one of the biggest challenges of the project.
Papier-mâché itself is not new to me, but I have never used it for a sculpture of this size before. At three metres, completely different problems begin to appear: weight, structural stability, reinforcement, and the challenge of building volume without making the sculpture unnecessarily heavy.
At the moment, I am building up the alligator’s body with expanding foam. It may not be the most elegant stage of the process, but it gives me a lightweight volume that I can gradually carve back into the final shape and silhouette. Once I am satisfied with the form, it will be covered with papier-mâché and developed further through surface, texture and detail.
Every new sculpture seems to bring its own collection of surprises, especially when I work with a new scale, material or construction method. With experience, you learn one important thing: problems will appear. You simply don’t know yet what they are going to be. That is not a failure of the process – it is part of the process. Sometimes the solution comes immediately; sometimes I need to leave the work alone for a while, think, experiment, and return with a different approach.
I also rarely work on just one piece at a time. Several projects tend to develop simultaneously in my studio, each at its own pace. Naturally, that makes the journey from the first idea to the finished work considerably longer, but it is also very much part of the way I work.
There is still an enormous amount to do before this life-size figurative sculpture is finished. But the alligator is growing, the girl is already looking decidedly unfriendly, and I think the two of them are beginning to find each other.
This mixed-media sculpture by Eliza Bono still has a long way to go.
Keep your fingers crossed for me. I have a feeling these two are going to give me some trouble. 🙂
