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Hello, everybody.
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Welcome to an afternoon of creativity here
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at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra.
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So lovely to see you all coming in today,
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and so grateful that you could join us
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for this fun session this afternoon.
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We've brought you so many artist workshops
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over the last few months, over the last year, in fact.
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We've had life drawing, we've had a watercolour portraiture,
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we've had charcoal drawing,
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but today we're going into the realm of 3D
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and we're actually gonna start exploring sculpture.
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So, about a year ago,
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our fantastic artist, Ellis Hutch
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I'll introduce you to her in a little while...
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She was stuck in lockdown and having to try and work
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out how to teach her visual art students,
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her sculpture students, how to sculpt, how to carve,
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they're in a group house, they have no tools with them,
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what to do?
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And so from that quandary,
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this particular programme that we're gonna bring
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to you today was born.
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So, before we get underway I'd like to acknowledge
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the traditional custodians of the land
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on which I'm broadcasting from today,
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the Ngambri and the Ngunawal peoples,
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and I'd like to extend my respect to their elders past,
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present and emerging.
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I'd also like to extend that same respect to any
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of the traditional custodians on the lands
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from which you come to us from today.
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I'm hoping that a few of you may have attended
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our workshops before, but for those of you who haven't,
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we like to make them highly interactive.
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And what do we mean by this?
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We actually love to see your faces.
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So if you could please leave your cameras
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on throughout this session,
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as we go around the room I'll show you this fantastic,
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gigantic screen, that Ellis will be able to see
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you working away on, and we'll be able to share
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our creations throughout the programme with her.
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It's always such a fantastic thing to see people
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being creative and being together
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in a community being creative.
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That said, we would like you to keep
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your microphones muted, just so that everybody can
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hear the session today,
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and we don't have anyone accidentally
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hijacking our microphones.
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Now, if you'd like to communicate
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with Ellis or myself throughout the programme,
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you can do so using the chat function on Zoom or using
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the comments section, if you're coming to us
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on Facebook Live.
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It looks like for all intents and purposes
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that I'm in an empty theatre,
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but there's a cast of thousands behind the scenes here.
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And I'd just like to introduce you on our way round
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to meeting Ellis today.
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First of all, we have the lovely Steph
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who is our Facebook Live expert.
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She's gonna be the person who's gonna be manning any
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of the comments there today.
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Coming further around, we have Matt.
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Matt is your Zoom friend.
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Some of you may recognise Matt from all
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of our virtual programmes.
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I can see Anita waving at Matt.
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He is a regular face here
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at the portrait gallery and he'll be communicating
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with you on Zoom today.
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So please pass your questions
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through to Matt and he'll pass them on to us.
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Production desk.
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The wizard, Hector, is hanging out over here.
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If any of the camera angles are not to your liking,
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he's the person to blame.
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(everybody laughs)
So please,
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shout out at Hector if you'd like to have any other
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camera views and we'll do our very best to accommodate.
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Now, as behind the camera...
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Rob, do you wanna come out and take a bow?
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Here's Rob, he's gonna be manning our camera for us.
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You may also recognise Rob from all
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of our virtual programmes.
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And here you all are joining us today
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from around Australia and the world.
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Oh, it's not very easy to see on our big screen
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but we can see you perfectly well.
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So let's move on to the artist of the moment, Ellis Hutch.
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I'd like to hand over to Ellis now and she can kick
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it off and take us through this wonderful
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workshop this afternoon.
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Ellis, over to you. Thank you so much for joining us.
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Thank you so much.
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It's really wonderful to be here today
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on Ngunawal country in Canberra.
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And I would also like to acknowledge the country
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that I'm on and also
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pay my respects to elders past,
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present and those forthcoming and to extend
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that acknowledgement to all the different places
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that you are all located on today.
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It feels very surreal to be here, it's very exciting,
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and I'm very keen to hear any kind of thoughts
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or comments or questions from you through the chat
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as we go on today.
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There are a couple of things that I'll start with...
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First is a little bit about me.
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So as you just heard, I teach,
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I teach sculpture currently at the ANU School of Art
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in the sculpture and special practises workshop.
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And I studied there.
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I did my first degree there in the early 1990s,
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and I studied quite a traditional curriculum when I was
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an undergraduate student, and we did do clay modelling
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of figures, and we also made relief sculptures.
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In fact, one of the,
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my most intensely disliked projects
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as an undergraduate student was a relief of a still life,
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the classic sort of bottle and ball.
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And we had to make this clay relief and then we had
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to cast it in plaster and then we had to paint it.
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And so I struggled through that project,
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and like many things,
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people do at art school, I didn't understand the value
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of it until later on.
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And that doing that kind of close observation,
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relief carving, representational work is a really
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great way to hone your observational skills.
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So even if you end up working in a very abstract way
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or a very experimental way,
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having those hand-eye coordination skills
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and that sense of ability to observe is really useful.
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And so over the years,
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I've dipped in and out of working with relief carving,
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and I've also worked with soap and wax.
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And in fact, I've made a work for the portrait
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gallery here in 2015 that was in an exhibition called
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"All That Fall".
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And it was, I was given a really exciting brief to make
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an ephemeral work for an exhibition,
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inspired by an artist called Theodora Cowan, who was
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an early 20th century female sculptor.
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And she'd been commissioned to make a memorial,
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a war memorial for the First World War.
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So I was asked to make a response to her work,
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and I made these huge wax panels because wax
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is the material that is lost in sculpture, lost wax.
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You use the wax,
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it gets melted away to make big bronze casts.
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And I carved into the surface of the wax shapes
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and forms that were inspired
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by Theo Cowen's original sculpture.
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And then I projected light through those wax forms,
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so you could see the carving on the other side.
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And that idea of working with light is very integral
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to my practise.
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So skip forward to last year,
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as you heard the story of trying to work
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out how to teach students online stuck
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in their houses without access to tools and workshops.
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And so working with carving portraiture in soap was
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the thing that I hit on as a way to work.
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And something that I discovered when I ran
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that workshop for my students was that it's so addictive.
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People just kind of got completely immersed in it.
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And in fact, I've got a little image here.
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I'm just putting it on my, the table in front of me.
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I think there's a camera that can show you.
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So this is the little sample piece that I made to show
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the students how to start a relief carving.
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And it's a really interesting process to think
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about that relationship between 2D and 3D and moving
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into 3D, because this is not really quite 3D.
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It's really somewhere in between and it's a starting
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point to moving into three dimensions.
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So it's a nice follow on from the workshops many
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of you may have already participated
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in through the portrait gallery, in drawing
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and watercolour, because if I turn this on its side
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and have that camera back on there again,
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you can see that it doesn't come out very far
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from the surface of the soap.
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And then when I turn it back you've got this illusion
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that it looks...
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Can I get it straight?
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It looks more three dimensional than it actually is.
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So we're playing with the same kind of illusory
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tactics that we use in drawing,
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but we do have a little bit of capacity to carve
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in and use light and shadow.
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And it's actually the shadow that really gives us
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that illusion of three-dimensionality.
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So a really great way to get started is just to get
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a bar of soap.
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And hopefully you've all got some soap there,
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and something pointy and try and have a little play
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with the kinds of marks you can make.
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And as we get started on that,
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I'll pull in a blank piece of soap and have a little
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play with it.
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There are a couple of little safety hints
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that it's really good to bear in mind.
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So when we're working with a material like...
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This is an unscented soap.
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If you have a soap that has a scent,
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and most soap does have some kind of a scent
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even if it's not heavily perfumed, you can,
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and you're working really close to it,
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it can be a bit fumey and it can give you a headache.
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So it's really good idea to work
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in a well ventilated space, or if you've got a fan,
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if you're not in a super well ventilated space to put
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a fan on, or just make sure that you've got access
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to fresh air and that you're not really close.
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If you're working with a scented soap it can be useful
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to wear a mask if you have one.
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I'm sure everyone has masks these days.
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(everybody laughs)
Masks just there.
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It's just a very common thing.
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So working with that...
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The other thing, sitting down working on something
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like this, and especially if you're bent over it,
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you can get sort of sore shoulders and a stiff neck.
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So moving around, making sure
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that you're just paying attention to your body
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when you're carving is a good thing.
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And then the last thing to pay attention to also
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is working with sharps.
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So I've never injured myself carving soap,
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and I've injured myself doing pretty much everything else.
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I'm quite clumsy.
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So I would say that it's generally a fairly safe exercise,
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but you are working with something pointy
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and sometimes you can be working.
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It can be a little bit slippery.
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So particularly if you're holding the soap in your hand,
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just be conscious of how you're using those points
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so you don't end up stabbing yourself in the hand
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or that your carving away rather than towards yourself.
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But generally, I think,
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if you're working slowly and thoughtfully,
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you should be pretty right.
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The tools that I've got here...
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This is just a ceramics,
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I'll just put that there, ceramics tool.
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And I also use a pair of scissors.
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They're the two things I use most out of anything else.
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I also use things like a skewer, pointy skewer.
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Something like this. I'm looking at the camera in reverse.
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So I'm trying to make sure I don't put things
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in strange places.
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Pallet knives, scrapers, anything that has a sharp edge,
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these are really great for making a kind of flat
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surface if you've got a really curved piece of soap,
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you can carve away like that.
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00:10:52.650 --> 00:10:54.680
A pair of scissors is really good for that too.
261
00:10:54.680 --> 00:10:59.080
So you can just scrape the surface back to make it flatter,
262
00:10:59.080 --> 00:11:00.707
if you want a flat surface,
263
00:11:00.707 --> 00:11:04.563
and another really nice thing you can do with any kind
264
00:11:04.563 --> 00:11:05.750
of point at all,
265
00:11:05.750 --> 00:11:09.300
particularly good with these ceramic tools,
266
00:11:09.300 --> 00:11:14.300
just brush that off, is create what's called an undercut.
267
00:11:14.520 --> 00:11:19.360
And so if I'm going to scrape away a bit of soap
268
00:11:21.130 --> 00:11:22.680
and make a shape, say,
269
00:11:22.680 --> 00:11:26.420
I'm making a kind of a cube type shape,
270
00:11:26.420 --> 00:11:27.530
I'm just going scrape, scrape,
271
00:11:27.530 --> 00:11:32.430
scrape with the side of this pointy bit and I'll show
272
00:11:32.430 --> 00:11:34.970
it to you what happens in a second...
273
00:11:38.540 --> 00:11:39.570
Scraping in...
274
00:11:39.570 --> 00:11:44.400
I'm cutting into the soap in a way
275
00:11:44.400 --> 00:11:46.330
that it's very
276
00:11:46.330 --> 00:11:51.160
rough here, but I'm just cutting underneath.
277
00:11:51.160 --> 00:11:52.690
And what happens then
278
00:11:55.100 --> 00:11:56.870
is that there's a shadow there,
279
00:11:56.870 --> 00:12:00.800
which makes the carved bit look like it's sitting out.
280
00:12:00.800 --> 00:12:03.790
Very, very rough, but if you've got some soap
281
00:12:03.790 --> 00:12:05.430
there and you've got some pointy things,
282
00:12:05.430 --> 00:12:07.904
just try a little bit of scraping,
283
00:12:07.904 --> 00:12:11.146
a little bit of drawing lines, some,
284
00:12:11.146 --> 00:12:15.046
you can kind of dig in and create a really nice
285
00:12:15.046 --> 00:12:18.960
convex kind of shape,
286
00:12:18.960 --> 00:12:20.480
especially if you've got a curve tool.
287
00:12:20.480 --> 00:12:22.900
But even if you don't have something with a curved
288
00:12:22.900 --> 00:12:25.450
blade on it, you can do that kind of digging
289
00:12:25.450 --> 00:12:28.939
in and going around to create this round sort of shape.
290
00:12:28.939 --> 00:12:32.480
Something else you might notice as I'm doing this here
291
00:12:32.480 --> 00:12:35.904
on this surface, is that I'm not always holding
292
00:12:35.904 --> 00:12:39.090
my point like a pencil.
293
00:12:39.090 --> 00:12:40.240
So a lot of people,
294
00:12:40.240 --> 00:12:42.070
if they've never carved anything will pick a tool
295
00:12:42.070 --> 00:12:45.050
like this up and start drawing as if they're drawing
296
00:12:45.050 --> 00:12:46.740
with a pencil.
297
00:12:46.740 --> 00:12:50.458
It's far more useful, easy,
298
00:12:50.458 --> 00:12:54.880
efficient to hold the tool with your hand flat like
299
00:12:54.880 --> 00:12:58.283
this or to hold it like this.
300
00:12:59.260 --> 00:13:02.960
And to change that sort of hold around depending
301
00:13:02.960 --> 00:13:03.793
on what you're doing,
302
00:13:03.793 --> 00:13:07.920
because I can scrape along the surface much
303
00:13:07.920 --> 00:13:11.100
more efficiently if I'm holding this tool this way
304
00:13:11.100 --> 00:13:15.230
or I can kind of go in close if I hold it like that.
305
00:13:15.230 --> 00:13:17.930
So I'm making a very big pile of messy soap
306
00:13:17.930 --> 00:13:20.280
and not achieving very much right now,
307
00:13:20.280 --> 00:13:21.510
other than just showing you a couple
308
00:13:21.510 --> 00:13:22.860
of little technical things.
309
00:13:24.160 --> 00:13:28.280
So that is a bit of a rundown about using tools
310
00:13:28.280 --> 00:13:32.570
and making a couple of different kinds of cuts
311
00:13:32.570 --> 00:13:33.403
into the surface.
312
00:13:33.403 --> 00:13:36.930
Something else that's really good to be aware of,
313
00:13:36.930 --> 00:13:40.480
and when I put that piece on its side before,
314
00:13:40.480 --> 00:13:43.350
I'll just show you, this is another,
315
00:13:43.350 --> 00:13:46.620
this is a geometrical shape that I made earlier
316
00:13:46.620 --> 00:13:48.183
this morning in a workshop,
317
00:13:50.620 --> 00:13:55.070
is that when people first start playing with carving,
318
00:13:55.070 --> 00:13:56.220
they'll often dig very,
319
00:13:56.220 --> 00:13:58.810
very deep into the surface and sort of carve down
320
00:13:58.810 --> 00:13:59.820
into the surface.
321
00:13:59.820 --> 00:14:02.610
You don't actually need to go very deep and don't need
322
00:14:02.610 --> 00:14:04.130
to use very much force.
323
00:14:04.130 --> 00:14:06.460
Because again, when I turn that on its side you can
324
00:14:06.460 --> 00:14:10.617
see that it doesn't come out very far.
325
00:14:10.617 --> 00:14:15.617
So I can be very gentle with my scraping, very light,
326
00:14:16.260 --> 00:14:18.680
and just create this tiny little bit of,
327
00:14:18.680 --> 00:14:20.455
these tiny little bits of flake.
328
00:14:20.455 --> 00:14:24.550
I don't need to dig hard or very deep into the surface,
329
00:14:24.550 --> 00:14:27.340
and that I'm letting the light do all the work
330
00:14:27.340 --> 00:14:29.330
of creating the illusion that I'm making
331
00:14:29.330 --> 00:14:31.620
a semi three-dimensional form.
332
00:14:31.620 --> 00:14:34.920
So I'll start making, I'll grab a fresh piece of soap,
333
00:14:34.920 --> 00:14:37.370
and I'm gonna start making a shape,
334
00:14:37.370 --> 00:14:38.590
just a geometrical shape.
335
00:14:38.590 --> 00:14:41.110
And I would suggest that you start with something like
336
00:14:41.110 --> 00:14:44.120
a cube or a pyramid,
337
00:14:44.120 --> 00:14:47.350
and just carve a three-dimensional or not
338
00:14:47.350 --> 00:14:51.500
quite three-dimensional form to see how you go with that.
339
00:14:51.500 --> 00:14:54.070
And then we could move on to looking at some portraits
340
00:14:54.070 --> 00:14:56.690
and how we start to work with a face.
341
00:14:56.690 --> 00:15:00.900
And I'll just give you one quick tip with this bit
342
00:15:00.900 --> 00:15:03.150
of soap that I've got sitting here on the desk.
343
00:15:03.150 --> 00:15:06.400
What I would do to start with is I will just draw
344
00:15:06.400 --> 00:15:08.350
an outline of the shape that I wanna make.
345
00:15:08.350 --> 00:15:12.220
So I think I'm gonna make a kind of sphere or maybe
346
00:15:12.220 --> 00:15:15.580
a sort of half a sphere kind of semicircle.
347
00:15:15.580 --> 00:15:20.150
So I'll just really lightly
348
00:15:20.150 --> 00:15:22.850
create the outline for that.
349
00:15:22.850 --> 00:15:25.260
So I've got a circular shape there,
350
00:15:25.260 --> 00:15:27.690
and then the next thing I'm gonna do is scrape
351
00:15:27.690 --> 00:15:31.540
away around it so that it becomes the form that sticks
352
00:15:31.540 --> 00:15:33.520
out from the surface.
353
00:15:33.520 --> 00:15:36.128
So I'm starting by taking a bit of the outside
354
00:15:36.128 --> 00:15:39.547
away and then I'll come back and work on that central
355
00:15:39.547 --> 00:15:44.547
form because that will be sitting proud from the surface.
356
00:15:46.200 --> 00:15:49.223
And I'm just gonna slowly dig away at it.
357
00:15:51.390 --> 00:15:52.320
And as you can see,
358
00:15:52.320 --> 00:15:55.960
I'm not sort of digging in or trying to scoop out,
359
00:15:55.960 --> 00:16:00.840
I'm just scraping over the surface to create this shape
360
00:16:04.350 --> 00:16:06.610
Ellis, because it's such delicate work
361
00:16:06.610 --> 00:16:09.040
and you don't need to use much force or dig much
362
00:16:09.040 --> 00:16:11.957
into the soap, do you need to use particularly
363
00:16:11.957 --> 00:16:14.540
sharp implements, or could this be something
364
00:16:14.540 --> 00:16:15.430
that parents could kind
365
00:16:15.430 --> 00:16:18.200
of experiment with their kids, with, maybe,
366
00:16:18.200 --> 00:16:19.800
not the good scissors?
367
00:16:19.800 --> 00:16:21.970
I think that that's a really great question
368
00:16:21.970 --> 00:16:23.690
and absolutely you don't need to use
369
00:16:23.690 --> 00:16:25.243
super sharp implements.
370
00:16:27.400 --> 00:16:29.380
I've got this kind of barbecue skewer here,
371
00:16:29.380 --> 00:16:33.230
which has a quite a sort of flat edge on it.
372
00:16:33.230 --> 00:16:35.240
And so I can run my fingers along it.
373
00:16:35.240 --> 00:16:37.400
I'm not gonna cut myself on it at all.
374
00:16:37.400 --> 00:16:38.560
And I can still,
375
00:16:38.560 --> 00:16:41.760
it's not as efficient as using a sharp blade,
376
00:16:41.760 --> 00:16:45.570
but I can certainly create the same kinds of results with it
377
00:16:49.530 --> 00:16:50.900
and work with that form.
378
00:16:50.900 --> 00:16:53.640
And so this is quite a blunt instrument, effectively,
379
00:16:53.640 --> 00:16:55.040
to be working with,
380
00:16:55.040 --> 00:16:59.680
and I can't get the same exact kind of sharpness of lines,
381
00:16:59.680 --> 00:17:04.680
but yeah, I could give this to someone who,
382
00:17:04.920 --> 00:17:08.570
a child or someone who doesn't feel comfortable
383
00:17:08.570 --> 00:17:11.960
working with really sharp implements.
384
00:17:11.960 --> 00:17:15.300
And you can still get a really effective result with that,
385
00:17:15.300 --> 00:17:17.120
because the soap itself is not super hard.
386
00:17:17.120 --> 00:17:19.940
Different soaps have different qualities, too.
387
00:17:19.940 --> 00:17:21.330
Some of them are much more waxy.
388
00:17:21.330 --> 00:17:23.230
Some of them are more brittle.
389
00:17:23.230 --> 00:17:25.830
So you might find that some of them are much easier
390
00:17:25.830 --> 00:17:27.043
to work with than others.
391
00:17:27.043 --> 00:17:28.870
And if they've been sitting around
392
00:17:28.870 --> 00:17:30.990
for a while and they've kind of dried out they become
393
00:17:30.990 --> 00:17:32.340
a lot more powdery.
394
00:17:32.340 --> 00:17:36.810
So there, that's something that you can bear in mind
395
00:17:38.850 --> 00:17:40.820
when you're working with different kinds of soap.
396
00:17:40.820 --> 00:17:43.820
And if a soap has Sorbolene in it or if it's got
397
00:17:43.820 --> 00:17:45.764
glycerin in it, or if it's,
398
00:17:45.764 --> 00:17:48.130
depending on what the materials are that it's been
399
00:17:48.130 --> 00:17:51.550
made out of, it will have different qualities.
400
00:17:51.550 --> 00:17:53.937
And also things like the atmosphere.
401
00:17:53.937 --> 00:17:57.728
If it's very humid, if it's very hot or cold,
402
00:17:57.728 --> 00:18:00.520
things will be more sticky or more brittle,
403
00:18:00.520 --> 00:18:04.280
which is very similar if anyone has worked with wax,
404
00:18:04.280 --> 00:18:05.540
you find that working with things like
405
00:18:05.540 --> 00:18:07.985
a microcrystalline wax which is what that work
406
00:18:07.985 --> 00:18:11.040
that I made for the portrait gallery is made out of,
407
00:18:11.040 --> 00:18:15.550
that if the temperature in my studio got very hot,
408
00:18:15.550 --> 00:18:18.753
the wax would be really sticky and it was much,
409
00:18:19.656 --> 00:18:20.710
then it would stick to itself when I was trying
410
00:18:20.710 --> 00:18:23.200
to carve it, and that's very similar with soap.
411
00:18:23.200 --> 00:18:24.940
And in fact, one of the things you can do,
412
00:18:24.940 --> 00:18:27.260
if you've got flake sticking to soap is just use
413
00:18:27.260 --> 00:18:29.610
a paintbrush and brush it off with a paint brush
414
00:18:29.610 --> 00:18:32.163
as you're working just to kind of make that,
415
00:18:34.780 --> 00:18:36.480
make it easier to see what you're doing
416
00:18:36.480 --> 00:18:38.930
as the different bits stick to it.
417
00:18:38.930 --> 00:18:39.950
So I'm just kind of carving
418
00:18:39.950 --> 00:18:42.653
away at this circular form here.
419
00:18:47.469 --> 00:18:51.840
And yeah, if people wanna, if you're getting started,
420
00:18:51.840 --> 00:18:54.020
if anyone's carving, it will be really great to see
421
00:18:54.020 --> 00:18:55.100
what people are working on.
422
00:18:55.100 --> 00:18:57.823
What kinds of shapes you've decided to work with.
423
00:19:01.270 --> 00:19:03.240
I can see lots of-
Anyone holding things up?
424
00:19:03.240 --> 00:19:04.960
Oh, we've got some sunlight soap,
425
00:19:04.960 --> 00:19:06.260
one of my favourite things.
426
00:19:07.580 --> 00:19:09.480
Oh, nice round soap there in the middle too.
427
00:19:09.480 --> 00:19:11.393
Oh, yeah. Great.
428
00:19:17.010 --> 00:19:17.880
So wonderful to see
429
00:19:17.880 --> 00:19:19.770
so many faces busily creating.
430
00:19:19.770 --> 00:19:20.900
It is. Yeah.
431
00:19:20.900 --> 00:19:24.430
It's, there's a very particular look people get
432
00:19:24.430 --> 00:19:26.400
on their faces when they're concentrating
433
00:19:26.400 --> 00:19:28.040
that's just delightful, isn't it,
434
00:19:28.040 --> 00:19:31.800
to see that look of intensity that people have...
435
00:19:32.740 --> 00:19:34.380
It's quite meditative, isn't it, really?
436
00:19:34.380 --> 00:19:36.790
Like, you sort of lose yourself in there.
437
00:19:36.790 --> 00:19:38.320
Yeah. Very much so.
438
00:19:38.320 --> 00:19:43.210
And I made a couple of test pieces before running
439
00:19:43.210 --> 00:19:46.337
this workshop and there was one night where I sat down
440
00:19:46.337 --> 00:19:50.010
at about 8:00 PM and I didn't look up to check
441
00:19:50.010 --> 00:19:51.760
the time until it was about midnight.
442
00:19:51.760 --> 00:19:53.533
And I was really surprised at the hours,
443
00:19:53.533 --> 00:19:55.380
they just kind of disappeared.
444
00:19:55.380 --> 00:20:00.250
And I'd just been so immersed in what I was doing,
445
00:20:00.250 --> 00:20:04.130
which is a thing that I find, I don't know if it's,
446
00:20:04.130 --> 00:20:06.280
I'm guessing it's similar for a lot of artists
447
00:20:06.280 --> 00:20:10.390
that when I find a process that I really enjoy
448
00:20:10.390 --> 00:20:12.710
that it's actually quite dangerous for me to work
449
00:20:12.710 --> 00:20:16.090
at nighttime because I do have a day job and I get
450
00:20:16.090 --> 00:20:19.370
so immersed that I'll happily sit up all night working
451
00:20:19.370 --> 00:20:22.700
and then I will have a very regretful time the next
452
00:20:22.700 --> 00:20:24.540
day trying to keep up with everything.
453
00:20:24.540 --> 00:20:26.880
So art and coffee are definitely
454
00:20:26.880 --> 00:20:28.400
things go hand in hand.
455
00:20:28.400 --> 00:20:29.450
(laughs) Very much so.
456
00:20:29.450 --> 00:20:31.550
We do have a question from Margaret who was wondering
457
00:20:31.550 --> 00:20:34.450
if you do anything with the shavings leftover from the...
458
00:20:34.450 --> 00:20:38.830
Oh, that's a great question. I do keep the shavings.
459
00:20:38.830 --> 00:20:40.540
I don't do a huge amount of soap carving,
460
00:20:40.540 --> 00:20:42.458
but when I do I keep the shavings and I also try
461
00:20:42.458 --> 00:20:45.430
and generally work with pure soap.
462
00:20:45.430 --> 00:20:50.302
And that means that I can use the soap to make wool wash.
463
00:20:50.302 --> 00:20:54.500
If you make a kind of a gel or a slurry out of pure
464
00:20:54.500 --> 00:20:56.020
soap you can pop it in your washing machine
465
00:20:56.020 --> 00:20:58.323
and you can wash all your woollens with it.
466
00:20:59.426 --> 00:21:01.820
I think people who do felting,
467
00:21:01.820 --> 00:21:03.610
one of the people in the workshop I was running
468
00:21:03.610 --> 00:21:06.490
this morning said that felters use pure soap
469
00:21:06.490 --> 00:21:09.200
when they're making, turning things into felt.
470
00:21:09.200 --> 00:21:13.010
So if you don't do felting yourself but crafty people,
471
00:21:13.010 --> 00:21:16.400
you can save the soap flakes and give it to them,
472
00:21:16.400 --> 00:21:17.610
or you can use it...
473
00:21:17.610 --> 00:21:21.600
You can even use it to wash your dishes, if you're,
474
00:21:21.600 --> 00:21:26.590
if you don't use the dishwasher, which I live by myself,
475
00:21:26.590 --> 00:21:29.870
so I often don't feel like I should be using
476
00:21:29.870 --> 00:21:32.118
my dishwasher when I don't fill it up very often.
477
00:21:32.118 --> 00:21:36.380
And if you are, I think you can still get them.
478
00:21:36.380 --> 00:21:38.920
You can get these little holders that you put bars
479
00:21:38.920 --> 00:21:41.500
of soap in, and you can sort of run the water
480
00:21:41.500 --> 00:21:44.630
over them and use that to wash your dishes.
481
00:21:44.630 --> 00:21:48.280
But you can also kind of use soap flakes and just put
482
00:21:48.280 --> 00:21:50.290
a little bit of that in your dish washing water
483
00:21:50.290 --> 00:21:51.960
and wash your dishes with it.
484
00:21:51.960 --> 00:21:53.093
So it's still functional.
485
00:21:53.093 --> 00:21:58.093
I haven't tried to use it to wash like in the bath
486
00:21:58.800 --> 00:22:02.230
or the shower, but you could potentially do that too.
487
00:22:02.230 --> 00:22:04.920
So I've just made this circular form here
488
00:22:04.920 --> 00:22:06.390
or oval shaped form.
489
00:22:06.390 --> 00:22:09.420
It's pretty rough. I'm not being very careful today.
490
00:22:09.420 --> 00:22:10.870
I'm interrupting you and distracting you.
491
00:22:10.870 --> 00:22:13.854
And what I'm doing is I've done an undercut
492
00:22:13.854 --> 00:22:16.523
and I'll stop in a sec so you can see,
493
00:22:17.510 --> 00:22:19.660
to give it that sense of it's sitting out on the surface,
494
00:22:19.660 --> 00:22:20.650
but then I've just,
495
00:22:20.650 --> 00:22:23.580
I'm just sort of scraping along the edges,
496
00:22:23.580 --> 00:22:25.700
so that adds to that illusion
497
00:22:25.700 --> 00:22:26.866
that it's three-dimensional...
498
00:22:26.866 --> 00:22:29.210
And I'll just put that down.
499
00:22:29.210 --> 00:22:31.960
So it's cut under here,
500
00:22:31.960 --> 00:22:34.788
but it's also along the edge that I've scraped.
501
00:22:34.788 --> 00:22:36.800
So it's almost like a burnishing,
502
00:22:36.800 --> 00:22:38.330
it's just taking the edge off so it doesn't have
503
00:22:38.330 --> 00:22:39.921
a square edge on it.
504
00:22:39.921 --> 00:22:44.060
And then I'm gonna turn this into a bowl shape
505
00:22:46.550 --> 00:22:48.903
just by carving into it.
506
00:22:58.650 --> 00:23:03.650
And I'm gonna have to pick up my piece of paper
507
00:23:03.840 --> 00:23:06.640
and tip the soap flakes off in a second, but I'll do
508
00:23:06.640 --> 00:23:07.840
this a little bit first.
509
00:23:16.250 --> 00:23:19.330
So this is a really nice thing that you can play with,
510
00:23:19.330 --> 00:23:21.920
and people who've done drawing classes,
511
00:23:21.920 --> 00:23:23.820
observational drawing classes will have spent a lot
512
00:23:23.820 --> 00:23:25.912
of time drawing vessels,
513
00:23:25.912 --> 00:23:29.000
if you're doing traditional drawing classes.
514
00:23:29.000 --> 00:23:30.160
So what I've done here
515
00:23:32.130 --> 00:23:36.060
just very simply is I've
516
00:23:41.570 --> 00:23:43.720
carved in at an angle.
517
00:23:43.720 --> 00:23:48.720
And so you can see that there's a shadow on the inside
518
00:23:48.979 --> 00:23:52.680
and the lip picks up a bit of light on the outside.
519
00:23:52.680 --> 00:23:54.816
So it gives it that sense that there's a hole
520
00:23:54.816 --> 00:23:56.380
or an opening.
521
00:23:56.380 --> 00:23:59.923
And if I keep going with that and just take that further,
522
00:24:10.450 --> 00:24:12.660
I can just give it more of that sense of being
523
00:24:12.660 --> 00:24:13.783
a vessel form.
524
00:24:21.270 --> 00:24:24.100
And if I'm fairly careful with that edge...
525
00:24:28.720 --> 00:24:31.090
No, just take this whole thing back.
526
00:24:31.090 --> 00:24:32.870
One of the good things about working with soap
527
00:24:32.870 --> 00:24:35.100
is if it's not quite right,
528
00:24:35.100 --> 00:24:37.390
you can just scrape it off and start again.
529
00:24:37.390 --> 00:24:39.030
And that's the thing that's hard to do
530
00:24:39.030 --> 00:24:39.985
when you first start.
531
00:24:39.985 --> 00:24:43.140
And I think a lot of people find that also with drawing,
532
00:24:43.140 --> 00:24:45.340
it's very hard just to rub it out or scrape it off
533
00:24:45.340 --> 00:24:47.616
and start again, because you get really attached
534
00:24:47.616 --> 00:24:50.330
to what you're doing and a little bit precious about it.
535
00:24:50.330 --> 00:24:52.760
But the good thing about soap is it's super cheap.
536
00:24:52.760 --> 00:24:56.130
And you can just say, nah, I'm not really happy with this.
537
00:24:56.130 --> 00:25:00.110
And usually when I'm starting something new,
538
00:25:00.110 --> 00:25:03.540
it will take me a few goes to work out the composition
539
00:25:03.540 --> 00:25:05.510
or how to get it exactly right.
540
00:25:05.510 --> 00:25:10.510
So with this vessel form I've just scraped off...
541
00:25:11.800 --> 00:25:14.050
Sorry, I should keep that in this spot here,
542
00:25:14.050 --> 00:25:15.720
because it's closer to the camera.
543
00:25:15.720 --> 00:25:17.800
I've scraped the top section back
544
00:25:24.643 --> 00:25:26.980
and now I've got that little bowl type shape
545
00:25:26.980 --> 00:25:29.731
that, there it is.
546
00:25:29.731 --> 00:25:32.940
Because I wear reading glasses,
547
00:25:32.940 --> 00:25:34.360
of course I can see what I'm doing here,
548
00:25:34.360 --> 00:25:36.010
as soon as I look up at the screen, I can't see anything.
549
00:25:36.010 --> 00:25:38.000
So I've gotta do that thing where I look over my glasses,
550
00:25:38.000 --> 00:25:40.280
like a librarian,
551
00:25:40.280 --> 00:25:44.890
and I can come back into it like this.
552
00:25:44.890 --> 00:25:49.380
So that's a little, very quick little bowl-like form.
553
00:25:49.380 --> 00:25:51.871
And that uses some of those tactics of an undercut
554
00:25:51.871 --> 00:25:55.360
and also just coming around the edges to create
555
00:25:55.360 --> 00:25:58.570
that sort of sense of a 3D,
556
00:25:58.570 --> 00:26:01.540
and something that I can
557
00:26:01.540 --> 00:26:04.350
show you talking about redoing things...
558
00:26:04.350 --> 00:26:07.070
So this is one of the portraits I did last week
559
00:26:07.070 --> 00:26:09.460
as a sample piece.
560
00:26:09.460 --> 00:26:11.193
And this is our friend
561
00:26:11.193 --> 00:26:14.320
Phillip Parker King, who we'll look at again later on.
562
00:26:14.320 --> 00:26:17.873
So this version of Mr. King is,
563
00:26:19.470 --> 00:26:22.390
it's not entirely like the original but it's got,
564
00:26:22.390 --> 00:26:24.260
it's sort of shares some of the features.
565
00:26:24.260 --> 00:26:27.150
And I think I started this one three times.
566
00:26:27.150 --> 00:26:28.840
So I started it. It wasn't quite right.
567
00:26:28.840 --> 00:26:30.773
I scraped it all off. I started it again.
568
00:26:30.773 --> 00:26:33.720
I got a second piece of soap and then I had another
569
00:26:33.720 --> 00:26:34.553
go at it.
570
00:26:34.553 --> 00:26:36.736
So, working backwards and forwards,
571
00:26:36.736 --> 00:26:39.196
if you're trying to create something representational.
572
00:26:39.196 --> 00:26:42.040
And those of you that have done life drawing would be
573
00:26:42.040 --> 00:26:43.850
very familiar with this that you often need to do
574
00:26:43.850 --> 00:26:45.020
a few quick sketches.
575
00:26:45.020 --> 00:26:48.720
You need to try out a few little test drawings,
576
00:26:48.720 --> 00:26:51.970
in life drawing you might do lots and lots of 30 second
577
00:26:51.970 --> 00:26:54.510
or one minute drawings before you go into a longer thing.
578
00:26:54.510 --> 00:26:57.380
So it's the same with the soap carving.
579
00:26:57.380 --> 00:26:59.317
It's something you can work fairly quickly with.
580
00:26:59.317 --> 00:27:02.700
And you can try the, get started,
581
00:27:02.700 --> 00:27:05.100
try and approach, work out if it works or not,
582
00:27:05.100 --> 00:27:07.306
you can scrape it off completely and start again
583
00:27:07.306 --> 00:27:10.100
or you can grab another piece of soap and you can have
584
00:27:10.100 --> 00:27:12.040
a few little versions of things.
585
00:27:12.040 --> 00:27:16.210
And you can also try and look at just individual features,
586
00:27:16.210 --> 00:27:18.440
which will be the next thing that we have a look
587
00:27:18.440 --> 00:27:23.033
at here is picking at an eye or a nose, for example,
588
00:27:23.033 --> 00:27:25.370
and see if they'll both be on
589
00:27:25.370 --> 00:27:27.758
that little spot in the camera,
590
00:27:27.758 --> 00:27:30.960
and honing in on a feature and seeing
591
00:27:30.960 --> 00:27:33.990
how you could potentially create that 3D illusion
592
00:27:33.990 --> 00:27:38.130
or how you could make it look like an actual person's eye,
593
00:27:38.130 --> 00:27:40.640
or in the case of today's exercise,
594
00:27:40.640 --> 00:27:42.770
we're working from images,
595
00:27:42.770 --> 00:27:45.690
and particularly working from profile images.
596
00:27:45.690 --> 00:27:49.640
So this morning I was running a workshop here
597
00:27:49.640 --> 00:27:52.960
in the gallery with a few attendees.
598
00:27:52.960 --> 00:27:55.930
And one of the people in the workshop
599
00:27:55.930 --> 00:27:57.160
is actually a jeweller.
600
00:27:57.160 --> 00:27:57.993
And she was saying,
601
00:27:57.993 --> 00:28:00.980
she's got lots of books sort of mediaeval jewellery
602
00:28:00.980 --> 00:28:03.910
and ancient jewellery and lots and lots of images of cameos.
603
00:28:03.910 --> 00:28:06.240
And she has one particular book that has all
604
00:28:06.240 --> 00:28:08.650
of these relief carvings of the portraits.
605
00:28:08.650 --> 00:28:11.620
And she said, there's about 1,000 images in the book
606
00:28:11.620 --> 00:28:13.493
and there are two of them that are straight
607
00:28:13.493 --> 00:28:15.590
on facing forwards.
608
00:28:15.590 --> 00:28:17.890
That they're mostly all in profile,
609
00:28:17.890 --> 00:28:20.090
because then you can get that shape of the, you know,
610
00:28:20.090 --> 00:28:23.170
the brow and the nose and you can build up from there.
611
00:28:23.170 --> 00:28:27.293
And if we go back to Mr. King here,
612
00:28:28.132 --> 00:28:30.232
let me put my glasses on so I can see him,
613
00:28:31.740 --> 00:28:35.120
that profile is really distinctive and it's a really
614
00:28:35.120 --> 00:28:35.953
fun one to work with.
615
00:28:35.953 --> 00:28:39.510
He's got such an excellent nose.
616
00:28:39.510 --> 00:28:43.200
And so that makes it kind of quite easy to copy.
617
00:28:43.200 --> 00:28:47.760
And I'll ask our wonderful tech folks here to bring up
618
00:28:47.760 --> 00:28:48.593
on the screen.
619
00:28:48.593 --> 00:28:51.800
I've got a couple of images of Lady Jane Franklin
620
00:28:51.800 --> 00:28:55.033
and Mrs. Grey,
621
00:28:56.580 --> 00:28:58.780
I think, coming up,
622
00:28:58.780 --> 00:29:02.470
so you can see Mrs. Grey there. She's not very 3D.
623
00:29:02.470 --> 00:29:04.607
She's quite, she's a quite a subtle carving.
624
00:29:04.607 --> 00:29:08.660
And I particularly love in that image her,
625
00:29:08.660 --> 00:29:12.610
the way her hand is coming out of her garments there.
626
00:29:12.610 --> 00:29:14.710
And you've got this real sense of the fabric going
627
00:29:14.710 --> 00:29:17.260
over the hand and the hand sort of coming forwards.
628
00:29:18.510 --> 00:29:22.670
It's a really lovely, subtle work by Teresa Walker.
629
00:29:22.670 --> 00:29:25.080
And if we go and move on to look
630
00:29:25.080 --> 00:29:28.450
at Jane Franklin, she's a much more
631
00:29:28.450 --> 00:29:31.850
three-dimensional image there.
632
00:29:31.850 --> 00:29:33.680
So she's a carved marble,
633
00:29:33.680 --> 00:29:35.370
and you can see that she's really coming
634
00:29:35.370 --> 00:29:37.070
out from that background.
635
00:29:37.070 --> 00:29:39.400
And so that's a bit of an evidence
636
00:29:39.400 --> 00:29:41.700
of that difference between a very what we'd call
637
00:29:41.700 --> 00:29:46.700
low relief, which is lady Grey, and that more kind
638
00:29:47.013 --> 00:29:50.080
of higher relief and work kind of coming
639
00:29:50.080 --> 00:29:53.200
into three dimensions of Jane Franklin.
640
00:29:53.200 --> 00:29:55.670
But I think Jane Franklin is a really lovely one
641
00:29:55.670 --> 00:30:00.670
to look at for the next exercise, which is to pick nose,
642
00:30:00.930 --> 00:30:04.370
eyes or maybe lips, and just work on one feature.
643
00:30:04.370 --> 00:30:06.380
And you might have an image at home,
644
00:30:06.380 --> 00:30:08.990
something lying around, where that you can look at,
645
00:30:08.990 --> 00:30:10.810
or we'll certainly, we'll put some closeups up
646
00:30:10.810 --> 00:30:12.290
on the screen here and you could work
647
00:30:12.290 --> 00:30:14.010
from the screen as well.
648
00:30:14.010 --> 00:30:17.310
I think that giving yourself that exercise of trying
649
00:30:17.310 --> 00:30:19.780
to work out how to just work on that one feature
650
00:30:19.780 --> 00:30:24.603
is a really nice practise observational opportunity.
651
00:30:25.590 --> 00:30:30.590
And I've got a very not accurate one here
652
00:30:31.860 --> 00:30:34.779
that was inspired by lady Franklin, that I've put
653
00:30:34.779 --> 00:30:35.904
on the table here,
654
00:30:35.904 --> 00:30:38.156
and you can see that it's a completely
655
00:30:38.156 --> 00:30:39.300
different face shape.
656
00:30:39.300 --> 00:30:40.540
And it's an unfinished one.
657
00:30:40.540 --> 00:30:42.242
And I wanted to bring this out and show you something
658
00:30:42.242 --> 00:30:44.620
that I'd been working on that I hadn't finished.
659
00:30:44.620 --> 00:30:47.869
So you can see some of those details where I've got
660
00:30:47.869 --> 00:30:52.869
one eye that's sort of almost there and the other
661
00:30:53.180 --> 00:30:54.337
eye's not in the right spot.
662
00:30:54.337 --> 00:30:56.570
And it's just a kind of lumpy bulge at the moment,
663
00:30:56.570 --> 00:30:58.550
but I can go back and work into that.
664
00:30:58.550 --> 00:30:59.673
And also with this one,
665
00:30:59.673 --> 00:31:02.009
I've been really playing with that composition
666
00:31:02.009 --> 00:31:07.009
of the undercuts around the face and the neck and shoulder,
667
00:31:07.380 --> 00:31:09.590
so that the sort of the soap kind of goes
668
00:31:09.590 --> 00:31:12.540
in and out of that 2D, 3D form.
669
00:31:12.540 --> 00:31:14.510
And if I tilt it that way
670
00:31:14.510 --> 00:31:16.100
it might be a bit easier to see.
671
00:31:16.100 --> 00:31:16.933
I'm not sure.
672
00:31:19.420 --> 00:31:23.861
So yes, the next suggestion I would make is have a go
673
00:31:23.861 --> 00:31:26.610
at one of Jane Franklins facial features.
674
00:31:26.610 --> 00:31:28.440
And I know we've got some closeups, I think,
675
00:31:28.440 --> 00:31:32.050
of parts of her face for people to look at.
676
00:31:32.050 --> 00:31:34.470
And also if there's any questions or comments
677
00:31:34.470 --> 00:31:38.533
or things people wanna share, please pop them in the chat.
678
00:31:42.440 --> 00:31:45.230
And while we're looking at her on the screen,
679
00:31:45.230 --> 00:31:46.980
something that's really interesting to look
680
00:31:46.980 --> 00:31:51.550
at is the relationship between the eyeball and the eyelids,
681
00:31:51.550 --> 00:31:54.590
and a lot of the time when people start to carve an eye,
682
00:31:54.590 --> 00:31:59.590
and I'll show you an example, is they might start by going,
683
00:31:59.971 --> 00:32:04.971
ah, an eye is this shape.
684
00:32:05.100 --> 00:32:07.060
So they do this shape.
685
00:32:07.060 --> 00:32:10.960
That's the space of the eye in between the eyelids.
686
00:32:10.960 --> 00:32:13.608
And they end up with a shape like that.
687
00:32:13.608 --> 00:32:18.608
And then they start doing an eyelid around it like this.
688
00:32:20.070 --> 00:32:23.743
And so, while that gives us those kinds of lines
689
00:32:23.743 --> 00:32:26.786
that we see, we recognise as an eye,
690
00:32:26.786 --> 00:32:30.160
the shape of an eye is actually, you know,
691
00:32:30.160 --> 00:32:32.626
the part that's in between our eyelids is just one
692
00:32:32.626 --> 00:32:37.626
section of a sphere, and our eyelids come over that sphere.
693
00:32:37.630 --> 00:32:41.400
So treating the whole sphere and the eye socket
694
00:32:41.400 --> 00:32:44.330
as one thing and starting from...
695
00:32:45.551 --> 00:32:48.373
I'm pointing at my own face here, but I'll look at,
696
00:32:49.390 --> 00:32:53.260
I'll bring a picture of Jane onto the desk.
697
00:32:53.260 --> 00:32:54.093
I could do...
698
00:32:54.093 --> 00:32:58.213
If we look at this picture that I have, we've got that...
699
00:32:58.213 --> 00:33:02.360
I just wanted to be able to point at a feature.
700
00:33:02.360 --> 00:33:03.270
We can do that.
701
00:33:03.270 --> 00:33:05.327
So if we're looking
702
00:33:08.920 --> 00:33:10.980
at her eye, in fact,
703
00:33:10.980 --> 00:33:12.810
I'm gonna draw with pencil,
704
00:33:12.810 --> 00:33:17.810
and we start by taking the whole this shape here,
705
00:33:17.870 --> 00:33:21.330
rather than this in-between bit between the eyelids.
706
00:33:21.330 --> 00:33:24.283
And so when we start our carving,
707
00:33:26.380 --> 00:33:28.919
we're thinking about the whole eyeball shape.
708
00:33:28.919 --> 00:33:32.810
And I'm going back to my bit of soap.
709
00:33:32.810 --> 00:33:34.250
And so I'm carving
710
00:33:37.180 --> 00:33:39.470
the whole eyeball shape.
711
00:33:39.470 --> 00:33:42.100
I'm gonna do this very messily.
712
00:33:42.100 --> 00:33:44.000
And then what I'm gonna do
713
00:33:44.000 --> 00:33:49.000
is carve around...
714
00:33:49.010 --> 00:33:50.790
As I started right at the very beginning,
715
00:33:50.790 --> 00:33:53.793
carve away some of the soap first.
716
00:33:59.880 --> 00:34:02.860
And so the portrait gallery has these wonderful objects
717
00:34:02.860 --> 00:34:05.320
in its collection that are these little wax medallions
718
00:34:05.320 --> 00:34:08.850
and relief carvings of all sorts of interesting people.
719
00:34:08.850 --> 00:34:11.980
And Jane Franklin was particularly interesting person.
720
00:34:11.980 --> 00:34:16.550
And it's quite lovely to have her portraits of a couple
721
00:34:16.550 --> 00:34:18.770
of colonial women to look at today,
722
00:34:18.770 --> 00:34:21.860
because they were given a pretty hard time.
723
00:34:21.860 --> 00:34:26.860
They were referred to often as too bold,
724
00:34:27.010 --> 00:34:29.830
too forthright, too outspoken.
725
00:34:29.830 --> 00:34:31.740
Jane Franklin was criticised a lot for being
726
00:34:31.740 --> 00:34:36.710
opinionated and outspoken, for not sort of standing
727
00:34:36.710 --> 00:34:41.040
back and being a nice polite lady.
728
00:34:41.040 --> 00:34:45.833
And she was also incredibly loyal to her husband,
729
00:34:46.840 --> 00:34:50.760
who was lost
730
00:34:50.760 --> 00:34:53.453
in an expedition up in the Arctic.
731
00:34:55.680 --> 00:34:57.020
The whole expedition was lost,
732
00:34:57.020 --> 00:34:59.520
and it's quite a famous sort of story
733
00:34:59.520 --> 00:35:01.890
of the Franklin expedition that went missing.
734
00:35:01.890 --> 00:35:04.308
I think they were trying to find a particular passage,
735
00:35:04.308 --> 00:35:07.854
the northwest passage or somewhere up through Antarctica.
736
00:35:07.854 --> 00:35:11.450
And if I remember the story correctly they were
737
00:35:11.450 --> 00:35:13.650
actually poisoned because they were eating food
738
00:35:13.650 --> 00:35:18.100
that was in tins that had lead lining or lead
739
00:35:18.100 --> 00:35:19.670
seams or something.
740
00:35:19.670 --> 00:35:23.663
But at the time that Lady Franklin was campaigning
741
00:35:23.663 --> 00:35:28.490
for the expedition to be rescued or to be searched for,
742
00:35:28.490 --> 00:35:29.600
no one knew what had happened.
743
00:35:29.600 --> 00:35:31.835
They'd just sort of disappeared off
744
00:35:31.835 --> 00:35:35.669
into the Arctic, and she campaigned relentlessly
745
00:35:35.669 --> 00:35:36.850
for there to be
746
00:35:37.797 --> 00:35:40.530
search expeditions and rescue expeditions
747
00:35:40.530 --> 00:35:42.390
and she became quite an expert
748
00:35:42.390 --> 00:35:43.900
on the Arctic in the process.
749
00:35:43.900 --> 00:35:46.320
She did a lot of study and learning and looking
750
00:35:46.320 --> 00:35:50.260
at maps and finding out what kind of potential places
751
00:35:50.260 --> 00:35:51.096
they might've ended up.
752
00:35:51.096 --> 00:35:56.096
And so her, the character traits she was criticised for,
753
00:35:56.530 --> 00:36:00.563
that outspokenness were actually character traits
754
00:36:00.563 --> 00:36:03.450
that meant that eventually, I think,
755
00:36:03.450 --> 00:36:05.608
some answers were found, the expedition was,
756
00:36:05.608 --> 00:36:08.260
everyone was lost.
757
00:36:08.260 --> 00:36:11.890
And yeah, so I think it's really interesting
758
00:36:11.890 --> 00:36:14.113
that these kind of colonial women,
759
00:36:15.230 --> 00:36:17.928
Lady Grey as well was heavily criticised for being
760
00:36:17.928 --> 00:36:20.010
not a very nice person.
761
00:36:20.010 --> 00:36:23.040
And she had an incredibly volatile relationship
762
00:36:23.040 --> 00:36:25.012
with her husband and there's actually a portrait of him
763
00:36:25.012 --> 00:36:26.780
in the collection as well.
764
00:36:26.780 --> 00:36:28.840
And someone, I don't know if it was one of the staff
765
00:36:28.840 --> 00:36:31.450
who was telling me how the two portraits often get
766
00:36:31.450 --> 00:36:35.053
shown facing away from each other because they had this,
767
00:36:36.820 --> 00:36:38.840
they separated and they got back together
768
00:36:38.840 --> 00:36:40.180
and they separated again.
769
00:36:40.180 --> 00:36:43.270
And it was a very fraught relationship.
770
00:36:43.270 --> 00:36:47.320
And lady Grey did not like living in the colonies.
771
00:36:47.320 --> 00:36:50.979
I think she was very unimpressed by being
772
00:36:50.979 --> 00:36:55.070
in Australia and then in New Zealand, has her lot
773
00:36:55.070 --> 00:36:58.610
being married to Mr. Grey,
774
00:36:58.610 --> 00:37:03.610
who was apparently credited with getting,
775
00:37:03.660 --> 00:37:06.702
was it the South Australian government out of debt?
776
00:37:06.702 --> 00:37:10.210
The early colonial government was very heavily in debt
777
00:37:10.210 --> 00:37:15.070
and he was a very severe financial manager and he did
778
00:37:15.070 --> 00:37:18.680
a lot of work to get the colony back in the black,
779
00:37:18.680 --> 00:37:21.790
but it was considered to be, I think,
780
00:37:21.790 --> 00:37:25.380
quite unpopular and abstemious as part of that.
781
00:37:25.380 --> 00:37:27.290
So it's always really fascinating to look
782
00:37:27.290 --> 00:37:31.910
at these portraits which I think the Jane Grey one
783
00:37:31.910 --> 00:37:34.429
is fascinating because it's so gentle and delicate
784
00:37:34.429 --> 00:37:38.559
and beautiful and Theresa Walker's work is so subtle.
785
00:37:38.559 --> 00:37:41.880
And then to read these stories that don't seem
786
00:37:41.880 --> 00:37:45.560
to reflect the stories
787
00:37:45.560 --> 00:37:47.430
of her being this kind
788
00:37:47.430 --> 00:37:50.640
of unpleasant person, but then Teresa Walker herself
789
00:37:50.640 --> 00:37:55.078
who's a beautiful colonial sculptor, had,
790
00:37:55.078 --> 00:37:58.290
was also criticised for being forthright,
791
00:37:58.290 --> 00:37:59.610
outspoken and eccentric.
792
00:37:59.610 --> 00:38:03.170
So I think if you were a woman in the colonies
793
00:38:03.170 --> 00:38:04.790
and you had any kind of an opinion,
794
00:38:04.790 --> 00:38:09.160
you were always subject to this sort of criticism
795
00:38:09.160 --> 00:38:14.160
or censure, and a really great to, sort of,
796
00:38:15.380 --> 00:38:19.720
to recognise women colonial artists because they don't
797
00:38:19.720 --> 00:38:24.720
get as much recognition often as their male counterparts.
798
00:38:25.320 --> 00:38:29.400
And in this year of the Know My Name campaign
799
00:38:29.400 --> 00:38:31.220
that the National Gallery's been running it's great
800
00:38:31.220 --> 00:38:35.160
to celebrate those artists who are maybe we're not
801
00:38:35.160 --> 00:38:37.180
as familiar with.
802
00:38:37.180 --> 00:38:40.633
So I'm taking quite a bit of time on this eye here,
803
00:38:41.500 --> 00:38:43.423
carving into this piece of soap,
804
00:38:44.560 --> 00:38:49.560
and I'm just gonna look back at the photocopies.
805
00:38:49.940 --> 00:38:54.130
So I've made this very rough kind of form
806
00:38:54.130 --> 00:38:57.510
and I'm working quite large.
807
00:38:57.510 --> 00:38:59.640
I think one of the things that people tend to do
808
00:38:59.640 --> 00:39:01.970
when they first start carving with sope is work really,
809
00:39:01.970 --> 00:39:05.330
really, sorry, I'll put this down here, really tiny.
810
00:39:05.330 --> 00:39:07.540
And it's hard when you're working very small to get
811
00:39:07.540 --> 00:39:08.670
a lot of detail.
812
00:39:08.670 --> 00:39:11.840
So if you pick up one single feature and you work
813
00:39:11.840 --> 00:39:15.070
quite big, it's easier to work out how to get
814
00:39:15.070 --> 00:39:20.070
it to work and be able to make changes
815
00:39:20.160 --> 00:39:21.860
to it if you need to change it.
816
00:39:21.860 --> 00:39:24.310
So what we've got then
817
00:39:25.300 --> 00:39:29.490
with Jane Franklin's eyes
818
00:39:29.490 --> 00:39:34.490
is I've got this very rough convex shape.
819
00:39:34.549 --> 00:39:38.840
And then I'm drawing back into it to create this sense
820
00:39:38.840 --> 00:39:42.200
of a, an eyelid
821
00:39:42.200 --> 00:39:45.180
that's coming over the eyeball,
822
00:39:45.180 --> 00:39:47.930
and I'm doing this in a very messy way at the moment.
823
00:39:47.930 --> 00:39:51.543
So just to kind of create an idea,
824
00:39:52.880 --> 00:39:54.970
it's not gonna look much like her eyes,
825
00:39:54.970 --> 00:39:56.730
because the problem is, of course,
826
00:39:56.730 --> 00:40:01.440
that I'm talking a lot and in the talking I'm not
827
00:40:01.440 --> 00:40:04.110
paying attention quite as much to what I'm doing.
828
00:40:04.110 --> 00:40:08.620
So you'll get me talking and being very inaccurate
829
00:40:08.620 --> 00:40:11.970
with my carving rather than being accurate
830
00:40:11.970 --> 00:40:13.873
with my carving and silent.
831
00:40:18.330 --> 00:40:20.970
And something that when I'm carving at home I love
832
00:40:20.970 --> 00:40:24.632
to do is put on a podcast and listen to a podcast
833
00:40:24.632 --> 00:40:27.673
and just quietly carve away.
834
00:40:34.010 --> 00:40:36.430
If anyone has any questions that I like to ask
835
00:40:36.430 --> 00:40:37.280
Ellis while they're here?
836
00:40:37.280 --> 00:40:40.093
Ah, yes, please do ask me some questions.
837
00:40:40.093 --> 00:40:41.153
Pop them in the chat.
838
00:40:42.010 --> 00:40:44.973
Either the chat or the Facebook Live comments.
839
00:40:45.820 --> 00:40:46.983
We love questions.
840
00:40:48.210 --> 00:40:50.930
Because a few people up there too busy to...
841
00:40:50.930 --> 00:40:51.763
Yeah.
842
00:40:51.763 --> 00:40:55.180
It's, I find that people just get completely immersed
843
00:40:55.180 --> 00:40:56.440
in the carving,
844
00:40:56.440 --> 00:40:58.610
because it's a very pleasurable thing to do.
845
00:40:58.610 --> 00:41:02.410
I find it very pleasurable and I get the impression
846
00:41:02.410 --> 00:41:04.890
that a lot of other people do as well.
847
00:41:04.890 --> 00:41:07.900
And we did have some emails backwards and forwards
848
00:41:07.900 --> 00:41:10.150
in the preparation for this workshop,
849
00:41:10.150 --> 00:41:14.260
where, apparently,
850
00:41:14.260 --> 00:41:18.480
carving soap, there's a whole kind of niche interest
851
00:41:18.480 --> 00:41:20.624
group on the internet who are
852
00:41:20.624 --> 00:41:25.624
into ASMR, which is that sensory experience
853
00:41:25.959 --> 00:41:28.300
of enjoying certain kinds of sounds.
854
00:41:28.300 --> 00:41:32.380
And that carving soap has its own whole ASMR
855
00:41:32.380 --> 00:41:35.100
interest group of people who will watch and listen
856
00:41:35.100 --> 00:41:38.480
to videos of other people carving soap to enjoy
857
00:41:38.480 --> 00:41:42.210
that sort of sensory experience of hearing the sound,
858
00:41:42.210 --> 00:41:44.510
the scraping of the carving.
859
00:41:44.510 --> 00:41:47.470
We might go viral with this video,
860
00:41:47.470 --> 00:41:49.690
on all kinds of special websites. (laughs)
861
00:41:49.690 --> 00:41:53.463
To get some proper, good sound recordings happening.
862
00:41:55.890 --> 00:41:57.220
Do you ever take,
863
00:41:57.220 --> 00:41:58.840
because it could be quite portable,
864
00:41:58.840 --> 00:41:59.860
this practise, couldn't it?
865
00:41:59.860 --> 00:42:03.210
Do you ever take it out en plein air or outside
866
00:42:03.210 --> 00:42:04.310
of the house?
867
00:42:04.310 --> 00:42:07.745
I haven't, mainly because I tend to find,
868
00:42:07.745 --> 00:42:10.190
I like to sit at a table to do it,
869
00:42:10.190 --> 00:42:12.130
but you could absolutely take it anywhere.
870
00:42:12.130 --> 00:42:17.060
And I think it's one of those things where going
871
00:42:17.060 --> 00:42:19.670
on holidays or going and doing an artist residency
872
00:42:19.670 --> 00:42:23.640
or something, it'd be really nice to easily take
873
00:42:23.640 --> 00:42:27.293
these kinds of tools and work with them in other places.
874
00:42:28.370 --> 00:42:31.548
And I had, someone commented,
875
00:42:31.548 --> 00:42:33.920
I was posting about this workshop
876
00:42:33.920 --> 00:42:36.160
on Facebook and Instagram and telling people
877
00:42:36.160 --> 00:42:37.330
I was doing it.
878
00:42:37.330 --> 00:42:40.802
And one of my acquaintances commented
879
00:42:40.802 --> 00:42:43.805
on the Instagram, I think it was the Facebook post,
880
00:42:43.805 --> 00:42:47.340
about using Pears soap, because you can see through it,
881
00:42:47.340 --> 00:42:49.790
it's got that beautiful amber kind of quality.
882
00:42:49.790 --> 00:42:53.290
And it led me to think that would be such
883
00:42:53.290 --> 00:42:58.290
a wonderful material to carve insects out of,
884
00:42:58.400 --> 00:43:00.573
because you'd have these kinds of look,
885
00:43:00.573 --> 00:43:02.730
that it would look like they were made out of amber.
886
00:43:02.730 --> 00:43:06.200
So I think I'll give that a try sometime.
887
00:43:06.200 --> 00:43:10.469
And I have got quite an extensive collection of cicada,
888
00:43:10.469 --> 00:43:13.550
cicada bodies and wings at home at the moment,
889
00:43:13.550 --> 00:43:16.610
because we had such a good summer for cicadas.
890
00:43:16.610 --> 00:43:19.400
So I collected a whole stack of them.
891
00:43:19.400 --> 00:43:22.190
So you might see me producing a whole stack
892
00:43:22.190 --> 00:43:26.152
of cicada soap carvings.
893
00:43:26.152 --> 00:43:27.770
Question from Punch
894
00:43:27.770 --> 00:43:29.860
who's carving in wax at the moment.
895
00:43:29.860 --> 00:43:32.090
And they were wondering if it's easier,
896
00:43:32.090 --> 00:43:33.943
if soap is easier for a beginner?
897
00:43:36.470 --> 00:43:38.320
I would probably say yes.
898
00:43:38.320 --> 00:43:42.020
I, although it very much depends on the kind
899
00:43:42.020 --> 00:43:44.230
of of wax you're using,
900
00:43:44.230 --> 00:43:49.050
because waxes have different levels of being brittle
901
00:43:49.050 --> 00:43:51.900
or malleable or soft or hard.
902
00:43:51.900 --> 00:43:55.380
And I know that something like paraffin wax, for example,
903
00:43:55.380 --> 00:43:58.200
is quite powdery and brittle,
904
00:43:58.200 --> 00:44:03.200
but then something like beeswax is very soft.
905
00:44:03.410 --> 00:44:05.920
And so it would really depend a lot on the kind
906
00:44:05.920 --> 00:44:08.280
of wax that you're carving with.
907
00:44:08.280 --> 00:44:11.498
And some waxes are really,
908
00:44:11.498 --> 00:44:14.360
you'd think they might be real easy to carve
909
00:44:14.360 --> 00:44:16.540
with and they're actually not.
910
00:44:16.540 --> 00:44:19.960
The wax carvings that I was doing when I made the work
911
00:44:19.960 --> 00:44:22.840
for the, for here, for the portrait gallery,
912
00:44:22.840 --> 00:44:25.740
were a particular kind of microcrystalline wax
913
00:44:25.740 --> 00:44:28.180
and they were fairly easy to carve.
914
00:44:28.180 --> 00:44:30.220
Probably no harder then carving soap.
915
00:44:30.220 --> 00:44:31.380
Ellis, can you see the screen?
916
00:44:31.380 --> 00:44:34.045
Oh, yes.
Punch carving in wax.
917
00:44:34.045 --> 00:44:36.050
(laughs) That's fantastic.
918
00:44:36.050 --> 00:44:36.883
A beloved pet?
919
00:44:36.883 --> 00:44:38.083
It's gorgeous.
920
00:44:40.200 --> 00:44:41.033
Yeah.
921
00:44:41.033 --> 00:44:45.293
That's really lovely. Oh, that's great.
922
00:44:47.360 --> 00:44:49.920
And so that reminds me while we are sitting here
923
00:44:49.920 --> 00:44:54.040
doing this is that with both wax and soap you can
924
00:44:54.040 --> 00:44:57.440
get really beautiful effects if you put a light behind it.
925
00:44:57.440 --> 00:45:01.210
So if I put this light on the table here and stick
926
00:45:01.210 --> 00:45:05.220
a piece of soap on it, you get this lovely,
927
00:45:05.220 --> 00:45:10.220
it's almost like a cameo type effect.
928
00:45:10.980 --> 00:45:13.210
And I don't know if that's blowing out on the camera
929
00:45:13.210 --> 00:45:16.740
or you can see if I move it away or close,
930
00:45:16.740 --> 00:45:18.710
that it's, that works.
931
00:45:18.710 --> 00:45:21.807
Yep. And so this is a really nice thing to play with.
932
00:45:21.807 --> 00:45:24.980
And in fact, an artist that I went to art school
933
00:45:24.980 --> 00:45:28.540
with who's also a Canberra based artist, Ham Darroch,
934
00:45:28.540 --> 00:45:32.120
he made a whole stack of work when he first finished
935
00:45:32.120 --> 00:45:34.740
art school where he did soap carvings,
936
00:45:34.740 --> 00:45:36.900
and he put a little timber frame around them
937
00:45:36.900 --> 00:45:39.120
and a little light behind them.
938
00:45:39.120 --> 00:45:41.770
And so the work sat on the wall and he had a little
939
00:45:41.770 --> 00:45:42.603
switch on top.
940
00:45:42.603 --> 00:45:44.390
So you press the switch and it would light up
941
00:45:44.390 --> 00:45:46.820
and you'd see that change and the light coming
942
00:45:46.820 --> 00:45:49.320
through the soap and that you could turn it off again.
943
00:45:49.320 --> 00:45:52.950
So I don't know if he has any of those works any more,
944
00:45:52.950 --> 00:45:57.710
but it was a very delightful mechanism for showing
945
00:45:57.710 --> 00:45:59.450
these beautiful little carvings.
946
00:45:59.450 --> 00:46:02.180
And I think from memory, his carvings were little sorts
947
00:46:02.180 --> 00:46:03.390
of domestic interiors.
948
00:46:03.390 --> 00:46:06.430
So carvings of lampshades and things like that.
949
00:46:06.430 --> 00:46:08.980
So there's certainly people out there who are using
950
00:46:10.380 --> 00:46:12.610
these as a contemporary art medium,
951
00:46:12.610 --> 00:46:16.280
as well as something we can do as a sort
952
00:46:16.280 --> 00:46:17.470
of delightful hobby.
953
00:46:17.470 --> 00:46:20.108
It it's being used in a whole range of different ways.
954
00:46:20.108 --> 00:46:21.870
Probably leads into a good question
955
00:46:21.870 --> 00:46:23.170
from Margaret, who's wondering,
956
00:46:23.170 --> 00:46:25.360
once the work is completed how long would a soap
957
00:46:25.360 --> 00:46:27.610
sculpture last and is there a good way to preserve
958
00:46:27.610 --> 00:46:28.865
it or protect it?
959
00:46:28.865 --> 00:46:30.580
That is a really good question.
960
00:46:30.580 --> 00:46:34.440
And in fact I'm not exactly sure how long a soap
961
00:46:34.440 --> 00:46:36.745
sculpture would last because the ones that I made
962
00:46:36.745 --> 00:46:41.140
more than 20 years ago I didn't hang on to and I tend
963
00:46:41.140 --> 00:46:42.453
to shed work.
964
00:46:43.480 --> 00:46:46.660
I work in a very sort of ephemeral way.
965
00:46:46.660 --> 00:46:50.653
So I would say that as long as it's not damp,
966
00:46:51.810 --> 00:46:52.643
you'll be fine.
967
00:46:52.643 --> 00:46:54.833
If it's stored in a dry environment.
968
00:46:55.672 --> 00:46:59.360
What will happen to soap over time is it does tend
969
00:46:59.360 --> 00:47:02.092
to shrink a bit because if there's moisture in it,
970
00:47:02.092 --> 00:47:05.134
the moisture will eventually dry out and the soap
971
00:47:05.134 --> 00:47:06.750
itself will shrink.
972
00:47:06.750 --> 00:47:10.500
But if it's kept in a dry and fairly stable environment
973
00:47:10.500 --> 00:47:14.680
I can't see why it wouldn't last for indefinitely.
974
00:47:14.680 --> 00:47:16.110
If it gets dusty,
975
00:47:16.110 --> 00:47:18.880
or if it's in an environment where the humidity changes
976
00:47:18.880 --> 00:47:20.900
a lot, which is pretty much the same thing,
977
00:47:20.900 --> 00:47:23.770
anything any kind of art and particularly things
978
00:47:23.770 --> 00:47:25.120
like works on paper,
979
00:47:25.120 --> 00:47:27.160
if they're in an environment where the humidity goes
980
00:47:27.160 --> 00:47:28.240
up and down,
981
00:47:28.240 --> 00:47:31.090
they'll expand and contract and crack and wrinkle.
982
00:47:31.090 --> 00:47:32.530
And the same goes for soap.
983
00:47:32.530 --> 00:47:34.826
If you've seen very old soap that's been used
984
00:47:34.826 --> 00:47:38.900
and then left, it kind of splits as it dries out.
985
00:47:38.900 --> 00:47:41.541
So that would be the thing I'd say if you were making
986
00:47:41.541 --> 00:47:44.459
soap carvings in you wanted to keep them is keep them
987
00:47:44.459 --> 00:47:46.630
in an environment where the humidity is not
988
00:47:46.630 --> 00:47:48.300
very hugely variable.
989
00:47:48.300 --> 00:47:52.004
So don't keep them in your bathroom, for example. Yeah.
990
00:47:52.004 --> 00:47:54.332
Get accidentally put in the bath.
991
00:47:54.332 --> 00:47:59.332
(laughs) And I'm all for making things not necessarily
992
00:48:00.328 --> 00:48:03.160
to treat them preciously and keep them forever either,
993
00:48:03.160 --> 00:48:06.600
but to have them in the moment or have them for a sort
994
00:48:06.600 --> 00:48:09.860
of experience or a certain amount of time.
995
00:48:09.860 --> 00:48:11.873
And then for them to, you know,
996
00:48:13.520 --> 00:48:16.740
be used or be given away or be shared...
997
00:48:18.540 --> 00:48:20.230
We've got some people showing us their-
998
00:48:20.230 --> 00:48:22.048
Their soap carvings?
Their eyes.
999
00:48:22.048 --> 00:48:23.204
Ah, great!
1000
00:48:23.204 --> 00:48:25.117
Got a few coming. Beautiful.
1001
00:48:25.117 --> 00:48:28.430
And Mel was holding up her sunlight soap.
1002
00:48:28.430 --> 00:48:33.090
Excellent.
Here we go.
1003
00:48:33.090 --> 00:48:35.830
Sunlight soap is a particular favourite of mine
1004
00:48:35.830 --> 00:48:39.350
because I made a massive work out of sunlight soap
1005
00:48:40.210 --> 00:48:41.043
in the '90s, a long time ago now.
1006
00:48:41.043 --> 00:48:43.059
We have some pictures of that.
1007
00:48:43.059 --> 00:48:46.989
And I spent time sitting in the art gallery
1008
00:48:46.989 --> 00:48:50.450
out at Strathnairn, which is an old farmhouse,
1009
00:48:50.450 --> 00:48:53.700
hand cutting up blocks of sunlight soap into tiles
1010
00:48:53.700 --> 00:48:56.343
and then tiling the walls of the gallery.
1011
00:48:57.260 --> 00:48:59.700
It was an amazing project and the smell was
1012
00:48:59.700 --> 00:49:02.800
just completely overpowering in the space.
1013
00:49:02.800 --> 00:49:06.270
And something that was really interesting for me was
1014
00:49:06.270 --> 00:49:09.180
that when audiences came into that space they would
1015
00:49:09.180 --> 00:49:10.950
start compulsively telling me all
1016
00:49:10.950 --> 00:49:13.160
of these incredible stories that this,
1017
00:49:13.160 --> 00:49:16.216
that having this smell that triggered memory
1018
00:49:16.216 --> 00:49:19.320
in the space meant that people would come
1019
00:49:19.320 --> 00:49:21.070
in and talk about having their mouths washed
1020
00:49:21.070 --> 00:49:23.180
out with soap when they were naughty children
1021
00:49:23.180 --> 00:49:26.490
or remembering growing up in an era
1022
00:49:26.490 --> 00:49:29.390
where their mother hand washed all of their clothes
1023
00:49:29.390 --> 00:49:31.700
in a big copper and then rung them out in a ringer.
1024
00:49:31.700 --> 00:49:35.220
So one of the things I did that was an unexpected part
1025
00:49:35.220 --> 00:49:37.310
of that, became an unexpected part of that exhibition
1026
00:49:37.310 --> 00:49:40.002
was collected of those stories and recorded them.
1027
00:49:40.002 --> 00:49:44.190
And it really made me conscious that the materiality
1028
00:49:44.190 --> 00:49:47.988
is so powerful when you're making objects
1029
00:49:47.988 --> 00:49:51.274
and that it really significantly contributes
1030
00:49:51.274 --> 00:49:54.272
to how people understand those objects, and what they mean,
1031
00:49:54.272 --> 00:49:56.163
what they mean to people.
1032
00:49:57.280 --> 00:50:00.640
And yeah, so that the soap is a,
1033
00:50:01.880 --> 00:50:03.560
it's a great material to carve with,
1034
00:50:03.560 --> 00:50:05.670
but it also has all these associations.
1035
00:50:05.670 --> 00:50:09.300
And as an artist you can really play
1036
00:50:09.300 --> 00:50:10.510
with those associations.
1037
00:50:10.510 --> 00:50:13.090
So you can start to think about soap having
1038
00:50:13.090 --> 00:50:15.550
associations with animal fat and having associations
1039
00:50:15.550 --> 00:50:20.027
with cleaning and the different kinds of scented
1040
00:50:20.027 --> 00:50:22.540
soaps have different associations
1041
00:50:22.540 --> 00:50:26.270
and that Pears soap as well, that beautiful transparency.
1042
00:50:26.270 --> 00:50:29.583
So if you're using soap to carve with,
1043
00:50:30.680 --> 00:50:32.620
you can really make the most of that,
1044
00:50:32.620 --> 00:50:36.880
the kind of the meaning that it has inherent in it.
1045
00:50:36.880 --> 00:50:38.607
And I should check,
1046
00:50:38.607 --> 00:50:42.030
how are we going for time here, 10 to three,
1047
00:50:42.030 --> 00:50:43.920
going pretty well.
1048
00:50:43.920 --> 00:50:45.640
Shayne did have a question
1049
00:50:45.640 --> 00:50:47.140
which interestingly enough
1050
00:50:47.140 --> 00:50:50.900
crops up in all of our workshops, not just soap carving,
1051
00:50:50.900 --> 00:50:52.690
but he's wondering how you stop from fiddling
1052
00:50:52.690 --> 00:50:54.230
with the details.
1053
00:50:54.230 --> 00:50:57.360
Ah, look, I do get stuck fiddling with the details
1054
00:50:57.360 --> 00:50:59.820
and I think that's one of those things
1055
00:50:59.820 --> 00:51:01.850
that's really about practise.
1056
00:51:01.850 --> 00:51:05.320
And sometimes, for me,
1057
00:51:05.320 --> 00:51:07.030
if I feel like I'm fiddling with the details,
1058
00:51:07.030 --> 00:51:09.070
I just need to stop altogether and start
1059
00:51:09.070 --> 00:51:11.740
doing something else.
1060
00:51:11.740 --> 00:51:14.510
And I certainly have found that,
1061
00:51:14.510 --> 00:51:16.483
and those of you that have done a lot of life drawing
1062
00:51:16.483 --> 00:51:20.460
will find this too, that doing a kind of,
1063
00:51:20.460 --> 00:51:21.870
particularly with a face,
1064
00:51:21.870 --> 00:51:24.570
trying to block the whole thing in and then go
1065
00:51:24.570 --> 00:51:28.919
and work through overall, a bit on every section,
1066
00:51:28.919 --> 00:51:32.647
and slowly come to the point where you're working
1067
00:51:32.647 --> 00:51:36.415
into the details is one strategy that a lot of people use,
1068
00:51:36.415 --> 00:51:39.011
but you've may have seen paintings,
1069
00:51:39.011 --> 00:51:42.040
hand-finished paintings that some people start
1070
00:51:42.040 --> 00:51:43.890
in one corner and they work the whole way through.
1071
00:51:43.890 --> 00:51:45.850
And they work at the same level of detail
1072
00:51:45.850 --> 00:51:47.030
the whole way across.
1073
00:51:47.030 --> 00:51:50.444
So it's sort of a different process for different people.
1074
00:51:50.444 --> 00:51:52.970
But I think the thing about fiddling with the details
1075
00:51:52.970 --> 00:51:54.320
and something that I've certainly done
1076
00:51:54.320 --> 00:51:57.190
is once you've fiddled enough of the details
1077
00:51:57.190 --> 00:51:59.524
that you've completely destroyed your work
1078
00:51:59.524 --> 00:52:01.592
or you've gone too far with it,
1079
00:52:01.592 --> 00:52:04.000
you sort of learn to pull back a bit.
1080
00:52:04.000 --> 00:52:06.470
And so sometimes going,
1081
00:52:06.470 --> 00:52:09.060
taking it so far that you've wrecked it is a really
1082
00:52:09.060 --> 00:52:11.350
good learning experience, because you kind of know,
1083
00:52:11.350 --> 00:52:13.595
you start to judge when you need to stop and pull back
1084
00:52:13.595 --> 00:52:15.110
and have a break.
1085
00:52:15.110 --> 00:52:18.014
And also, if I'm fiddling with the details,
1086
00:52:18.014 --> 00:52:21.940
that might be a sign that I need to put it down go
1087
00:52:21.940 --> 00:52:23.270
and have a cup of tea,
1088
00:52:23.270 --> 00:52:25.352
put it away until tomorrow and then come back
1089
00:52:25.352 --> 00:52:27.540
to it and have another look at it,
1090
00:52:27.540 --> 00:52:29.650
because sometimes I'm fiddling with a detail
1091
00:52:29.650 --> 00:52:33.218
because it doesn't feel right or something's not working.
1092
00:52:33.218 --> 00:52:35.260
And when I come back and look at it later on,
1093
00:52:35.260 --> 00:52:37.380
I realised that the thing that I was focused on isn't
1094
00:52:37.380 --> 00:52:39.170
the problem anyway, it's some other part
1095
00:52:39.170 --> 00:52:41.730
of it that needs to be fixed or dealt
1096
00:52:41.730 --> 00:52:43.610
with that I haven't really been paying a lot
1097
00:52:43.610 --> 00:52:45.210
of attention to.
1098
00:52:45.210 --> 00:52:48.720
So, yeah. Good question.
1099
00:52:48.720 --> 00:52:51.400
I'm not exactly sure because I certainly find
1100
00:52:51.400 --> 00:52:54.950
that I get trapped in that one at times,
1101
00:52:54.950 --> 00:52:56.940
but I think one of the things is just to be conscious
1102
00:52:56.940 --> 00:52:59.520
of it and to sort of ask yourself
1103
00:52:59.520 --> 00:53:02.923
if that's what you're doing, you need to take a break.
1104
00:53:06.950 --> 00:53:10.873
So I'm still working on this eyeball.
1105
00:53:13.220 --> 00:53:15.740
And something that's quite interesting I think
1106
00:53:15.740 --> 00:53:18.056
about working on a single facial feature is you do get
1107
00:53:18.056 --> 00:53:22.470
to work out how it comes together,
1108
00:53:22.470 --> 00:53:25.430
and that can then help if you work on individual
1109
00:53:25.430 --> 00:53:28.879
elements like the eye or a nose or lips,
1110
00:53:28.879 --> 00:53:30.987
that when it comes to doing the whole face
1111
00:53:30.987 --> 00:53:35.350
you've potentially solved some of the problems in advance.
1112
00:53:37.029 --> 00:53:40.597
And I've kind of cut too deep into this eye.
1113
00:53:40.597 --> 00:53:43.718
But one of the things I really noticed when I was
1114
00:53:43.718 --> 00:53:48.718
looking at Jane Franklin's eyes and that original,
1115
00:53:49.640 --> 00:53:52.710
that beautiful sculpture that we've been looking at,
1116
00:53:52.710 --> 00:53:56.900
is that where on the outside of her eye, the upper
1117
00:53:56.900 --> 00:53:59.786
eyelid kind of goes over the top of the lower eyelid
1118
00:53:59.786 --> 00:54:03.190
and making that happen in the carving,
1119
00:54:03.190 --> 00:54:05.580
really paying attention to
1120
00:54:05.580 --> 00:54:09.680
how those two eyelids sit
1121
00:54:09.680 --> 00:54:10.730
with each other.
1122
00:54:10.730 --> 00:54:14.260
And that I'd started trying to do a version
1123
00:54:14.260 --> 00:54:16.260
of her whole face.
1124
00:54:16.260 --> 00:54:19.595
And I got totally stuck just on the right eye
1125
00:54:19.595 --> 00:54:21.540
and left everything else.
1126
00:54:21.540 --> 00:54:24.060
'Cause I was having this problem just with that little
1127
00:54:24.060 --> 00:54:26.880
bit where the outside of the eyelid sits,
1128
00:54:26.880 --> 00:54:30.050
the upper eyelid sits over the top of the bottom eyelid.
1129
00:54:30.050 --> 00:54:33.230
And so that's where stopping the whole face and going
1130
00:54:33.230 --> 00:54:36.741
and just looking at that eye and resolving
1131
00:54:36.741 --> 00:54:40.250
that relationship and then coming back to the whole
1132
00:54:40.250 --> 00:54:44.580
face and being able to do the eye,
1133
00:54:44.580 --> 00:54:48.037
understanding what that relationship was,
1134
00:54:48.037 --> 00:54:52.030
I think is really helpful.
1135
00:54:52.030 --> 00:54:54.140
So if I was going to do a whole series of soap
1136
00:54:54.140 --> 00:54:57.720
carved portraits, I'd probably do quite a few
1137
00:54:57.720 --> 00:55:00.685
separate ones that focus on details.
1138
00:55:00.685 --> 00:55:03.564
And then I would take those details back
1139
00:55:03.564 --> 00:55:07.670
into the whole face portrait.
1140
00:55:07.670 --> 00:55:12.270
And I've just cut too far into my eyelid here as well. So...
1141
00:55:12.270 --> 00:55:14.560
Nice thing about soap is if you cut too far you can
1142
00:55:14.560 --> 00:55:16.520
just scrape it all back and keep going,
1143
00:55:16.520 --> 00:55:18.570
or you can scrape it off and start again.
1144
00:55:19.930 --> 00:55:22.680
I tend to find, and this is really happening for me today,
1145
00:55:22.680 --> 00:55:25.383
talking and working means that I will,
1146
00:55:27.309 --> 00:55:28.957
I'm not being as careful as I would normally be
1147
00:55:28.957 --> 00:55:32.960
so I'm going a bit too far with some of the aspects,
1148
00:55:32.960 --> 00:55:34.530
and I might stop doing this eye
1149
00:55:34.530 --> 00:55:35.630
because I'm doing exactly that.
1150
00:55:35.630 --> 00:55:38.590
I'm just kind of carving away more and more,
1151
00:55:38.590 --> 00:55:43.060
and might start looking at a profile or a whole face,
1152
00:55:43.060 --> 00:55:45.030
but really interested to see how people,
1153
00:55:45.030 --> 00:55:47.840
where are people up to with your carvings at the moment.
1154
00:55:47.840 --> 00:55:49.260
We'll give a shout out to Kim Scott
1155
00:55:49.260 --> 00:55:50.190
on Facebook too,
1156
00:55:50.190 --> 00:55:52.770
who thanked us for taking this out to the regions
1157
00:55:52.770 --> 00:55:56.523
which is the whole point of these workshops
1158
00:55:56.523 --> 00:55:57.910
is that we can get to people outside
1159
00:55:57.910 --> 00:56:00.530
of Canberra and get to people around
1160
00:56:00.530 --> 00:56:02.590
Australia and around the world.
1161
00:56:02.590 --> 00:56:05.670
I think it's so important and it's been
1162
00:56:05.670 --> 00:56:10.670
so fascinating as an artist over the last year,
1163
00:56:10.980 --> 00:56:15.652
just how much we can tap into things
1164
00:56:15.652 --> 00:56:18.210
happening in other parts of the world and we can attend
1165
00:56:18.210 --> 00:56:19.380
workshops and talks.
1166
00:56:19.380 --> 00:56:23.150
And I was completely blown away recently to watch some
1167
00:56:23.150 --> 00:56:27.540
of those Laurie Anderson talks online,
1168
00:56:27.540 --> 00:56:30.089
that she's just one of my art heroes,
1169
00:56:30.089 --> 00:56:32.886
and to get to see her present these really magical
1170
00:56:32.886 --> 00:56:36.500
Zoom talks, I'll probably never get to see
1171
00:56:36.500 --> 00:56:37.940
her in the flesh,
1172
00:56:37.940 --> 00:56:40.386
but having that opportunity to experience someone's
1173
00:56:40.386 --> 00:56:43.133
work in that way, it's really exciting.
1174
00:56:44.070 --> 00:56:45.340
So...
1175
00:56:45.340 --> 00:56:47.030
We do have a question from Maggie.
1176
00:56:47.030 --> 00:56:48.970
Is the curve tool you're using a special
1177
00:56:48.970 --> 00:56:50.320
tool for sculpting?
1178
00:56:50.320 --> 00:56:52.970
Ah, the curve tool I'm using is a ceramics tool.
1179
00:56:52.970 --> 00:56:56.650
So you can buy these at art supply stores,
1180
00:56:56.650 --> 00:57:01.650
ceramic supply stores, $2 shops, reject shops.
1181
00:57:02.280 --> 00:57:04.960
If you're in a sort of shopping centre,
1182
00:57:04.960 --> 00:57:08.050
if you've got a kind of an art supply store or one
1183
00:57:08.050 --> 00:57:11.400
of those kind of everything bargain shops,
1184
00:57:11.400 --> 00:57:13.900
you can often pick up these tools in the sort
1185
00:57:13.900 --> 00:57:15.860
of arty crafty section.
1186
00:57:15.860 --> 00:57:17.180
And sometimes they come in packs.
1187
00:57:17.180 --> 00:57:19.110
So you get a whole bunch of different tools
1188
00:57:19.110 --> 00:57:23.770
in the pack that have pointy bits and round bits.
1189
00:57:23.770 --> 00:57:25.500
And we've got another one here.
1190
00:57:25.500 --> 00:57:27.430
This other one that I've just put down on the table
1191
00:57:27.430 --> 00:57:29.730
is another ceramics carving tool that just has a kind
1192
00:57:29.730 --> 00:57:32.920
of a loop shape on it and you can carve really
1193
00:57:32.920 --> 00:57:34.103
easily with that.
1194
00:57:35.840 --> 00:57:37.910
The other thing that is a really great,
1195
00:57:37.910 --> 00:57:39.620
and I don't have any on the table with me,
1196
00:57:39.620 --> 00:57:41.133
is a really great tool to use,
1197
00:57:41.133 --> 00:57:43.415
are lino cutting tool and you can buy them
1198
00:57:43.415 --> 00:57:45.220
at art supply stores as well.
1199
00:57:45.220 --> 00:57:47.433
And often they come in a pack of three or four
1200
00:57:47.433 --> 00:57:50.320
and they've got different shaped blades on the end
1201
00:57:50.320 --> 00:57:52.823
of them and etching tools.
1202
00:57:52.823 --> 00:57:56.860
So scissors are also, like, quite sharp,
1203
00:57:56.860 --> 00:57:59.610
pointy scissors can be a really nice thing to work
1204
00:57:59.610 --> 00:58:03.929
with and I often will carve away at things
1205
00:58:03.929 --> 00:58:05.553
with scissors too.
1206
00:58:07.160 --> 00:58:09.120
So yeah, the short answer is
1207
00:58:09.120 --> 00:58:12.555
it is a specialist tool for ceramics.
1208
00:58:12.555 --> 00:58:14.810
They're very easy to get hold of.
1209
00:58:14.810 --> 00:58:16.940
And they're usually pretty cheap as well.
1210
00:58:16.940 --> 00:58:18.880
Very affordable art form, this one, isn't it?
1211
00:58:18.880 --> 00:58:19.713
It is!
1212
00:58:19.713 --> 00:58:21.930
It is a very affordable art form and I'm a big advocate
1213
00:58:21.930 --> 00:58:24.250
of affordable art forms.
1214
00:58:24.250 --> 00:58:27.440
I've spent a lot of my practise over the last 20
1215
00:58:27.440 --> 00:58:29.230
years working with things like masking tape
1216
00:58:29.230 --> 00:58:33.801
and cardboard and paper and very freely available
1217
00:58:33.801 --> 00:58:35.650
and non-specialist materials.
1218
00:58:35.650 --> 00:58:38.530
And I think it's always an interesting challenge
1219
00:58:38.530 --> 00:58:43.410
to try and work with materials that are considered
1220
00:58:43.410 --> 00:58:44.840
to be ordinary and not special,
1221
00:58:44.840 --> 00:58:48.560
but to transform them into something that creates
1222
00:58:48.560 --> 00:58:50.540
that sort of sense of joy or wonder.
1223
00:58:50.540 --> 00:58:55.110
And as someone who...
1224
00:58:55.110 --> 00:59:00.110
I do art as my life and make a living and teach,
1225
00:59:00.930 --> 00:59:04.140
but I also like to make things for pleasure.
1226
00:59:04.140 --> 00:59:07.557
And so just having things to hand that you can pick up
1227
00:59:07.557 --> 00:59:12.250
and work with and throw away at the end,
1228
00:59:12.250 --> 00:59:14.000
that are not sort of precious things that you need
1229
00:59:14.000 --> 00:59:15.850
to hang on to or find ways to store,
1230
00:59:15.850 --> 00:59:17.380
or that cost a lot to make.
1231
00:59:17.380 --> 00:59:21.280
And certainly in sculpture, as a sculpture student,
1232
00:59:21.280 --> 00:59:23.650
I was looking at people who were working in bronze
1233
00:59:23.650 --> 00:59:26.820
and these incredibly permanent media and also
1234
00:59:26.820 --> 00:59:29.010
incredibly expensive and taking lots and lots
1235
00:59:29.010 --> 00:59:30.780
of people to make.
1236
00:59:30.780 --> 00:59:34.460
And bronze sculpture is stunningly beautiful.
1237
00:59:34.460 --> 00:59:36.610
And I know some amazingly skilled artists who work
1238
00:59:36.610 --> 00:59:38.740
in those areas, but for me,
1239
00:59:38.740 --> 00:59:42.013
the idea of committing things to permanency,
1240
00:59:42.860 --> 00:59:44.990
it doesn't always sit well with that sort of idea
1241
00:59:44.990 --> 00:59:47.060
that we're living in a society
1242
00:59:47.060 --> 00:59:49.450
where we're just producing so much stuff and we have
1243
00:59:49.450 --> 00:59:51.370
to find ways to deal with all that stuff.
1244
00:59:51.370 --> 00:59:54.660
And there's so much waste that we're producing all
1245
00:59:54.660 --> 00:59:57.180
the time, and our galleries and institutions are
1246
00:59:57.180 --> 00:59:58.990
filling up with things as well.
1247
00:59:58.990 --> 01:00:03.120
So I'm not really looking to make things that have
1248
01:00:03.120 --> 01:00:05.550
a sense of a legacy to last into the future.
1249
01:00:05.550 --> 01:00:08.270
I'm really much more about making things that are part
1250
01:00:08.270 --> 01:00:11.150
of a conversation with audiences now.
1251
01:00:11.150 --> 01:00:14.500
And so maybe I'm shooting myself in the foot.
1252
01:00:14.500 --> 01:00:17.260
I'm not gonna go down in history because nothing
1253
01:00:17.260 --> 01:00:19.330
will exist after I'm gone...
1254
01:00:19.330 --> 01:00:20.700
Viral soap carving video.
1255
01:00:20.700 --> 01:00:22.250
Yeah, possibly. Yeah.
1256
01:00:22.250 --> 01:00:24.543
I'll leave it somewhere on the internet.
1257
01:00:27.120 --> 01:00:30.780
Just before I move on to looking at a profile of a face.
1258
01:00:30.780 --> 01:00:32.740
Does anyone else have any questions?
1259
01:00:32.740 --> 01:00:34.330
We haven't had any other questions coming.
1260
01:00:34.330 --> 01:00:35.170
Oh, I'm sorry.
1261
01:00:35.170 --> 01:00:36.840
I think Maggie did us one way back
1262
01:00:36.840 --> 01:00:39.600
about the scraping off and starting again.
1263
01:00:39.600 --> 01:00:42.097
Do you take the complete surface off it?
1264
01:00:42.097 --> 01:00:42.930
Yeah.
1265
01:00:42.930 --> 01:00:45.680
So this kind of mangled eye that I've been working
1266
01:00:45.680 --> 01:00:46.910
on while I've been talking...
1267
01:00:46.910 --> 01:00:48.880
Oh, we're gonna scrape off?
I'll scrape that off.
1268
01:00:48.880 --> 01:00:51.545
So I'll just take the scissors and I'll just scrape
1269
01:00:51.545 --> 01:00:54.563
it back completely to a flat surface.
1270
01:00:56.210 --> 01:00:58.436
And this can be very liberating
1271
01:00:58.436 --> 01:01:01.396
if you're in that feedback loop of I'm working
1272
01:01:01.396 --> 01:01:04.630
on this one detail and I'm stuck on it and I keep
1273
01:01:04.630 --> 01:01:05.710
fiddling around the edges
1274
01:01:05.710 --> 01:01:07.530
with it and I'm not getting anywhere.
1275
01:01:07.530 --> 01:01:10.160
And I'm just digging a deeper and deeper hole for myself.
1276
01:01:10.160 --> 01:01:12.810
And you're literally digging a hole for yourself
1277
01:01:12.810 --> 01:01:13.990
when you're doing this.
1278
01:01:13.990 --> 01:01:15.521
You can just scrape it back.
1279
01:01:15.521 --> 01:01:17.530
And then you've got a completely fresh surface
1280
01:01:17.530 --> 01:01:18.490
to work with.
1281
01:01:18.490 --> 01:01:20.053
I'm doing this pretty roughly.
1282
01:01:21.320 --> 01:01:23.300
If I was being a bit more careful with this I'd get
1283
01:01:23.300 --> 01:01:28.300
it much more, much flatter, but yet just scrape it off,
1284
01:01:28.300 --> 01:01:31.870
and you can do that with part of something.
1285
01:01:31.870 --> 01:01:33.690
So you can have something that you're working
1286
01:01:33.690 --> 01:01:36.610
on and you don't want to scrap the entire thing away.
1287
01:01:36.610 --> 01:01:41.610
So, for example, I've got this little one here
1288
01:01:43.170 --> 01:01:47.520
that I did this morning of Mrs. Grey.
1289
01:01:47.520 --> 01:01:52.110
So I sort of started off with this and I can look
1290
01:01:52.110 --> 01:01:53.717
at it and sort of go, no, I think there's,
1291
01:01:53.717 --> 01:01:55.900
it's kind of okay.
1292
01:01:55.900 --> 01:01:58.173
The nose is not quite at the right angle.
1293
01:01:59.270 --> 01:02:00.370
I'm not really sure.
1294
01:02:00.370 --> 01:02:03.270
I might just scrape a bit of that back there,
1295
01:02:03.270 --> 01:02:08.270
change the angle of her nose and sort of scrape around it,
1296
01:02:08.340 --> 01:02:11.840
and then not really convinced about what's going
1297
01:02:11.840 --> 01:02:15.070
on with her hair.
1298
01:02:15.070 --> 01:02:18.564
So I might sort of scrape half of it off on this side
1299
01:02:18.564 --> 01:02:21.803
and leave part of the profile there.
1300
01:02:25.510 --> 01:02:30.510
So I'm not getting rid of it completely,
1301
01:02:31.450 --> 01:02:33.590
but I'm losing a little bit of it with the thought
1302
01:02:33.590 --> 01:02:36.960
that wasn't 100% happy with this composition.
1303
01:02:36.960 --> 01:02:40.600
So I'll just take a bit of it away and start again
1304
01:02:41.560 --> 01:02:42.700
or work back into it.
1305
01:02:42.700 --> 01:02:45.860
So you can scrape it all off. You can scrape part of it off.
1306
01:02:45.860 --> 01:02:47.310
This is a different kind of soap.
1307
01:02:47.310 --> 01:02:50.370
And I'm really noticing that it's a bit more waxy
1308
01:02:50.370 --> 01:02:51.640
than the other one I'm working with.
1309
01:02:51.640 --> 01:02:56.640
So it does, the surface does respond differently
1310
01:02:56.840 --> 01:03:01.340
to this scraping, but yeah,
1311
01:03:01.340 --> 01:03:04.040
because it's soap and because part of the reason
1312
01:03:04.040 --> 01:03:07.849
I'm doing the soap carving is out of the joy of doing
1313
01:03:07.849 --> 01:03:09.240
the soap carving.
1314
01:03:09.240 --> 01:03:10.890
If I don't end up with anything at the end,
1315
01:03:10.890 --> 01:03:12.573
it's not the end of the world.
1316
01:03:17.450 --> 01:03:21.070
So I think I'll look at a profile...
1317
01:03:21.070 --> 01:03:22.883
And before I do that,
1318
01:03:22.883 --> 01:03:24.710
I'm just gonna empty some of these soap flakes off my table.
1319
01:03:24.710 --> 01:03:26.640
I'm getting covered in soap here.
1320
01:03:26.640 --> 01:03:30.763
So I'll just tip this out.
1321
01:03:41.370 --> 01:03:45.020
And I'll just pop another piece that I made.
1322
01:03:45.020 --> 01:03:47.850
This is one that I prepared earlier.
1323
01:03:47.850 --> 01:03:52.630
So we were looking at Jane Grey and, no, sorry,
1324
01:03:52.630 --> 01:03:54.890
Jane Franklin and lady Grey.
1325
01:03:54.890 --> 01:03:58.270
And that sort of relationship between the sort
1326
01:03:58.270 --> 01:03:59.940
of the 2D and the 3D.
1327
01:03:59.940 --> 01:04:02.810
And this other subject that I've got sitting here
1328
01:04:02.810 --> 01:04:07.580
is Phillip Parker King, who I was really taken
1329
01:04:07.580 --> 01:04:11.580
by this portrait because he's just got such a great nose,
1330
01:04:11.580 --> 01:04:14.920
and working with someone who has really
1331
01:04:14.920 --> 01:04:18.530
distinctive features, it can mean that it has a very
1332
01:04:18.530 --> 01:04:20.947
kind of caricatured look about it.
1333
01:04:20.947 --> 01:04:24.250
But also if you're starting to work with portraiture,
1334
01:04:24.250 --> 01:04:26.900
it gives you something very straightforward
1335
01:04:26.900 --> 01:04:29.380
and obvious to depict.
1336
01:04:29.380 --> 01:04:31.860
It's sort of like this person has a nose
1337
01:04:31.860 --> 01:04:33.420
that's a very distinctive shape.
1338
01:04:33.420 --> 01:04:36.430
So I can really start with that profile.
1339
01:04:36.430 --> 01:04:39.096
And one of the things that can be helpful
1340
01:04:39.096 --> 01:04:42.750
if you're working from an image is even if you've got
1341
01:04:42.750 --> 01:04:46.273
a print out, which I've got here and I'll just stick
1342
01:04:46.273 --> 01:04:51.273
down on the table, is I will get a pencil
1343
01:04:51.408 --> 01:04:55.350
and I'll just trace around the person's profile,
1344
01:04:55.350 --> 01:04:59.070
around their nose and their brow.
1345
01:04:59.070 --> 01:05:03.860
So I can understand how that looks and see
1346
01:05:03.860 --> 01:05:05.260
that there's this shape.
1347
01:05:05.260 --> 01:05:07.480
And it goes in here and it comes out there.
1348
01:05:07.480 --> 01:05:11.390
And obviously in real life we don't have big black
1349
01:05:11.390 --> 01:05:13.480
lines around our facial features,
1350
01:05:13.480 --> 01:05:16.560
but working from an image to a carving,
1351
01:05:16.560 --> 01:05:20.050
this is just one little strategy to be able to see
1352
01:05:20.050 --> 01:05:21.446
clearly what that shape is.
1353
01:05:21.446 --> 01:05:25.527
And then to translate that into a carving.
1354
01:05:25.527 --> 01:05:28.336
And I haven't quite got the angle of his nose right there.
1355
01:05:28.336 --> 01:05:31.400
It's not exactly right, but it's sort of,
1356
01:05:31.400 --> 01:05:33.690
it's somewhere in the general vicinity.
1357
01:05:33.690 --> 01:05:36.520
And what you could potentially do
1358
01:05:36.520 --> 01:05:38.461
if you're really wanting to get that profile
1359
01:05:38.461 --> 01:05:42.474
accurate is you could photocopy this to the scale
1360
01:05:42.474 --> 01:05:44.684
of the piece of soap and even trace it onto a piece
1361
01:05:44.684 --> 01:05:48.720
of tracing paper and trace the profile onto the soap.
1362
01:05:48.720 --> 01:05:52.429
And then you would have that correct kind of outline
1363
01:05:52.429 --> 01:05:54.393
to work back from.
1364
01:05:55.290 --> 01:05:58.490
I clearly didn't do this in this case because his nose
1365
01:05:58.490 --> 01:06:00.400
is sort of sticking out a bit more and not kind
1366
01:06:00.400 --> 01:06:05.400
of going down as much, but I did use the printout.
1367
01:06:06.275 --> 01:06:07.653
And one of the things I did,
1368
01:06:07.653 --> 01:06:09.550
and I'm just gonna do it like this,
1369
01:06:09.550 --> 01:06:13.760
is I turned it upside down when I was copying
1370
01:06:13.760 --> 01:06:18.503
from the image, so that as I was making this profile,
1371
01:06:19.880 --> 01:06:22.650
and those of you who've done a lot of drawing would
1372
01:06:23.830 --> 01:06:25.170
be familiar with this technique,
1373
01:06:25.170 --> 01:06:27.970
if you turn something upside down, it just sort of,
1374
01:06:27.970 --> 01:06:30.110
it's like a circuit breaker in your brain.
1375
01:06:30.110 --> 01:06:34.720
Our brains absolutely love shortcuts.
1376
01:06:34.720 --> 01:06:37.740
And so we'll look at something and our brain will say,
1377
01:06:37.740 --> 01:06:38.630
that's a face.
1378
01:06:38.630 --> 01:06:40.010
I know what a face looks like.
1379
01:06:40.010 --> 01:06:41.830
And then our eyes will just disengage.
1380
01:06:41.830 --> 01:06:44.256
And we won't actually be observing very accurately.
1381
01:06:44.256 --> 01:06:47.700
And we'll draw the thing that our brain knows is a nose
1382
01:06:47.700 --> 01:06:48.730
or an eye.
1383
01:06:48.730 --> 01:06:52.520
That's often not an observational record, but is a symbol.
1384
01:06:52.520 --> 01:06:56.940
And so in the most extreme case things like emoticons
1385
01:06:56.940 --> 01:07:01.010
or, you know, a circle with two dots and a U
1386
01:07:01.010 --> 01:07:02.710
is a smiley face and we all recognise
1387
01:07:02.710 --> 01:07:03.890
that as a smiley face,
1388
01:07:03.890 --> 01:07:05.300
there's nothing in there that looks like
1389
01:07:05.300 --> 01:07:07.010
an actual human face.
1390
01:07:07.010 --> 01:07:09.880
And so our brains are great at creating
1391
01:07:09.880 --> 01:07:11.592
symbols and shortcuts.
1392
01:07:11.592 --> 01:07:15.560
And so one way to sort of get around our brains' habit
1393
01:07:15.560 --> 01:07:18.980
of short-cutting is to turn an image upside down
1394
01:07:18.980 --> 01:07:21.525
so that then, when I'm looking at the upside down image,
1395
01:07:21.525 --> 01:07:24.410
I'm noticing the lines
1396
01:07:24.410 --> 01:07:26.930
and the relationship between the angles.
1397
01:07:26.930 --> 01:07:29.580
I'm not thinking that's a nose or that's an eye,
1398
01:07:29.580 --> 01:07:30.940
or that's an ear.
1399
01:07:30.940 --> 01:07:33.185
And it's a very well-known strategy that a lot
1400
01:07:33.185 --> 01:07:34.447
of drawing teachers use,
1401
01:07:34.447 --> 01:07:39.447
and it does work quite well with this technique of doing,
1402
01:07:39.511 --> 01:07:42.020
making portraits, relief portraits.
1403
01:07:42.020 --> 01:07:45.680
And so I'm just scraping away
1404
01:07:45.680 --> 01:07:47.230
at this nose thinking I might be able
1405
01:07:47.230 --> 01:07:48.710
to get it a bit more,
1406
01:07:48.710 --> 01:07:51.323
get that angle a bit closer to how it should be.
1407
01:07:52.570 --> 01:07:54.950
Do you ever work from life, Ellis?
1408
01:07:54.950 --> 01:07:58.810
I haven't done... I've never done any carving from life.
1409
01:07:58.810 --> 01:08:01.810
I've done a lot of life drawing over the years,
1410
01:08:01.810 --> 01:08:06.660
but I've never tried to work from life in this form.
1411
01:08:06.660 --> 01:08:10.150
And I haven't done a lot of portraiture carving.
1412
01:08:10.150 --> 01:08:14.120
So, really, I've, when I've carved soap in the past
1413
01:08:14.120 --> 01:08:16.280
or carved wax in the past,
1414
01:08:16.280 --> 01:08:20.770
it's been more abstract or I did a whole series
1415
01:08:20.770 --> 01:08:22.560
when I was a student that were little kinds
1416
01:08:22.560 --> 01:08:24.520
of architectural spaces.
1417
01:08:24.520 --> 01:08:28.170
And so portraiture is not the kind of realm
1418
01:08:28.170 --> 01:08:29.690
of my own practise.
1419
01:08:29.690 --> 01:08:34.180
And this particular project came out of teaching
1420
01:08:34.180 --> 01:08:35.520
this course at art school,
1421
01:08:35.520 --> 01:08:38.481
that the title of the course was politics of bodies, and,
1422
01:08:38.481 --> 01:08:40.690
which was so great to teach last year
1423
01:08:40.690 --> 01:08:42.980
during COVID and in shutdown and on Zoom
1424
01:08:42.980 --> 01:08:44.350
with Black Lives Matter
1425
01:08:44.350 --> 01:08:46.130
and all this stuff going on around the world,
1426
01:08:46.130 --> 01:08:48.987
and all of this incredible stuff about spatial
1427
01:08:48.987 --> 01:08:52.997
social distancing and the way that being a body
1428
01:08:52.997 --> 01:08:57.200
in society was politicised in all sorts of ways,
1429
01:08:57.200 --> 01:08:59.640
or it became more obvious the kind of politics
1430
01:08:59.640 --> 01:09:03.780
of our own relationships, social relationships.
1431
01:09:03.780 --> 01:09:07.040
And so the portrait,
1432
01:09:07.040 --> 01:09:09.378
soap carving portrait exercise I devised
1433
01:09:09.378 --> 01:09:11.470
for my students when we were starting to think
1434
01:09:11.470 --> 01:09:14.830
about the relationship between portraiture and power,
1435
01:09:14.830 --> 01:09:18.560
and the kinds of incredible situations we're seeing
1436
01:09:18.560 --> 01:09:20.690
around the world where colonial statues were being
1437
01:09:20.690 --> 01:09:22.650
pulled down and destroyed and thrown
1438
01:09:22.650 --> 01:09:24.430
in rivers and replaced.
1439
01:09:24.430 --> 01:09:27.341
And so looking at these colonial figures
1440
01:09:27.341 --> 01:09:31.530
and thinking about who they were and that process
1441
01:09:31.530 --> 01:09:36.530
of kind of memorialising or creating documents, and the,
1442
01:09:37.010 --> 01:09:40.150
I didn't ask my students to reproduce colonial portraits.
1443
01:09:40.150 --> 01:09:41.690
I actually asked them to start to think
1444
01:09:41.690 --> 01:09:43.830
about creating self-portraits and thinking
1445
01:09:43.830 --> 01:09:47.570
about what the function of portraiture might be today
1446
01:09:47.570 --> 01:09:50.340
in a society that, particularly in Australia, where,
1447
01:09:50.340 --> 01:09:51.440
you know, we're still,
1448
01:09:52.380 --> 01:09:54.500
we're not really a post-colonial society,
1449
01:09:54.500 --> 01:09:56.929
we're still very much a colonial place
1450
01:09:56.929 --> 01:10:00.970
and we're still operating within a lot of these kinds
1451
01:10:00.970 --> 01:10:02.380
of colonising systems too.
1452
01:10:02.380 --> 01:10:05.270
So to think about what is the role of portraiture
1453
01:10:05.270 --> 01:10:06.770
is a really interesting question.
1454
01:10:06.770 --> 01:10:08.740
And I'm sure that you working here at the portrait
1455
01:10:08.740 --> 01:10:10.970
gallery are asking those questions all the time
1456
01:10:10.970 --> 01:10:13.000
and having these conversations at all sorts
1457
01:10:13.000 --> 01:10:14.250
of different levels.
1458
01:10:14.250 --> 01:10:16.630
So that's a very long answer to say that I don't
1459
01:10:16.630 --> 01:10:19.450
normally make portraits inside. (laughs)
1460
01:10:19.450 --> 01:10:23.240
And so I haven't tried doing it as a life exercise.
1461
01:10:23.240 --> 01:10:25.070
Although when I was an undergraduate student,
1462
01:10:25.070 --> 01:10:28.410
I certainly did sculpture,
1463
01:10:28.410 --> 01:10:31.630
life modelling sculpture in clay and working
1464
01:10:31.630 --> 01:10:36.400
from a life model and we did a full body clay
1465
01:10:36.400 --> 01:10:38.610
modelling exercise that went on for several weeks,
1466
01:10:38.610 --> 01:10:41.670
where we had the same model for two or three days a week,
1467
01:10:41.670 --> 01:10:43.570
and we'd come in and we would actually sit
1468
01:10:43.570 --> 01:10:47.000
there and do the whole modelling with our teacher,
1469
01:10:47.000 --> 01:10:49.480
Ante Dabro, who has a few sculptures around,
1470
01:10:49.480 --> 01:10:51.323
commissions around Canberra.
1471
01:10:52.990 --> 01:10:56.240
And something that was really interesting for me was then,
1472
01:10:56.240 --> 01:10:57.210
many years later,
1473
01:10:57.210 --> 01:11:01.010
I was a model for a portrait sculpting class.
1474
01:11:01.010 --> 01:11:05.640
So I got to sit and watch the students make
1475
01:11:05.640 --> 01:11:06.930
portraits of me.
1476
01:11:06.930 --> 01:11:11.552
And it was fascinating to see people modelling my face,
1477
01:11:11.552 --> 01:11:14.106
but every single person did it so differently.
1478
01:11:14.106 --> 01:11:18.030
And there were always some of their own features in there.
1479
01:11:18.030 --> 01:11:19.650
It's sort of this really...
1480
01:11:19.650 --> 01:11:22.170
And I think people who've done a lot of life drawing
1481
01:11:22.170 --> 01:11:26.300
see that too, that life drawing classes, you see people,
1482
01:11:26.300 --> 01:11:28.680
drawing their own body shape as well as the model.
1483
01:11:28.680 --> 01:11:29.770
It's often this combination,
1484
01:11:29.770 --> 01:11:32.100
like tall people stretch everyone and short people
1485
01:11:32.100 --> 01:11:34.180
shorten everyone, and, you know,
1486
01:11:34.180 --> 01:11:36.720
very thin people make people more angular.
1487
01:11:36.720 --> 01:11:38.840
And it's sort of like we know our own bodies
1488
01:11:38.840 --> 01:11:41.420
and we know ourselves so intimately that we apply
1489
01:11:41.420 --> 01:11:44.220
our experience of the world to the way
1490
01:11:44.220 --> 01:11:46.285
that we represent other bodies.
1491
01:11:46.285 --> 01:11:49.250
And this is a bit of a tangent,
1492
01:11:49.250 --> 01:11:53.250
but I would highly recommend to anyone who's willing
1493
01:11:53.250 --> 01:11:54.290
to take their clothes off,
1494
01:11:54.290 --> 01:11:56.900
that being a life model is a really fascinating
1495
01:11:56.900 --> 01:11:59.780
and affirming experience, because you see that no one
1496
01:11:59.780 --> 01:12:01.162
sees you the way you see yourself.
1497
01:12:01.162 --> 01:12:02.830
And so you shouldn't,
1498
01:12:02.830 --> 01:12:04.350
you don't need to worry about judging yourself
1499
01:12:04.350 --> 01:12:05.710
because no one sees you,
1500
01:12:05.710 --> 01:12:07.770
no one judges you the way you judge yourself,
1501
01:12:07.770 --> 01:12:09.918
and they see you in completely different ways according
1502
01:12:09.918 --> 01:12:12.050
to the way that they see themselves.
1503
01:12:12.050 --> 01:12:15.270
So I know it sounds like a bit of a stretch for a lot
1504
01:12:15.270 --> 01:12:17.730
of people, but life modelling is,
1505
01:12:17.730 --> 01:12:21.368
it's very interesting and educational experience.
1506
01:12:21.368 --> 01:12:23.970
I've gone off on an incredible tangent here
1507
01:12:23.970 --> 01:12:25.470
and I'm really curious to know
1508
01:12:25.470 --> 01:12:29.100
what our audience are
1509
01:12:29.100 --> 01:12:31.110
doing right now, because I'm wondering
1510
01:12:31.110 --> 01:12:33.440
if they've started looking at Mr. King and seeing
1511
01:12:33.440 --> 01:12:36.745
if I can create a profile.
1512
01:12:36.745 --> 01:12:39.370
If anyone's had a go at that yet,
1513
01:12:39.370 --> 01:12:41.500
or if you're working on the things you've already
1514
01:12:41.500 --> 01:12:42.980
been continuing, you're continuing
1515
01:12:42.980 --> 01:12:43.960
what you've been working away at?
1516
01:12:43.960 --> 01:12:46.780
So you could see a couple of people holding things
1517
01:12:46.780 --> 01:12:47.733
up over there.
1518
01:12:50.560 --> 01:12:54.120
Lots of beautiful concentrating faces. It's wonderful.
1519
01:12:54.120 --> 01:12:57.520
I love it, seeing those, that intense concentration.
1520
01:12:57.520 --> 01:12:58.800
There were a couple of people
1521
01:12:58.800 --> 01:13:00.470
who had other people
1522
01:13:00.470 --> 01:13:02.670
with them as they were creating, oh, Punch's
1523
01:13:02.670 --> 01:13:04.370
just turned her camera on.
1524
01:13:04.370 --> 01:13:06.992
They could potentially use each other as models...
1525
01:13:06.992 --> 01:13:08.030
Yes, they could.
1526
01:13:08.030 --> 01:13:11.863
Life modelling for soap carving perhaps.
1527
01:13:24.010 --> 01:13:26.410
Here we've got quite a few people working
1528
01:13:26.410 --> 01:13:27.823
steadily away there.
1529
01:13:30.690 --> 01:13:33.653
And curious if anyone's been working upside down.
1530
01:13:35.420 --> 01:13:37.710
We haven't, we've got the image the right way up
1531
01:13:37.710 --> 01:13:39.323
on the screen.
We do, yes.
1532
01:13:47.070 --> 01:13:50.400
So it it's, I don't know if other people are having
1533
01:13:50.400 --> 01:13:52.550
the same situation, but because I wear reading glasses
1534
01:13:52.550 --> 01:13:54.450
I'm sort of switching backwards and forwards
1535
01:13:54.450 --> 01:13:57.160
between looking at this with glasses on glasses off,
1536
01:13:57.160 --> 01:14:01.700
and to keep remembering to put my glasses on so I can
1537
01:14:01.700 --> 01:14:03.150
see what I'm doing.
1538
01:14:03.150 --> 01:14:08.150
But I think it's always really interesting to look at...
1539
01:14:08.440 --> 01:14:09.730
And I was talking about this,
1540
01:14:09.730 --> 01:14:10.910
it kind of relates to that thing
1541
01:14:10.910 --> 01:14:15.009
before about our brains being really good at shortcuts
1542
01:14:15.009 --> 01:14:19.630
is sometimes when you look closely at an image
1543
01:14:19.630 --> 01:14:24.550
or an object, and I think it works really well
1544
01:14:24.550 --> 01:14:27.520
with Phillip King who's up on the screen is if you look
1545
01:14:27.520 --> 01:14:29.433
at the shape of his eyelid,
1546
01:14:30.560 --> 01:14:35.560
and what we know or experience about our own eyelids,
1547
01:14:36.160 --> 01:14:38.359
but then when I looked at when I was trying to carve
1548
01:14:38.359 --> 01:14:40.470
his eyelid and I kept getting it wrong,
1549
01:14:40.470 --> 01:14:42.020
and then I started looking at it, I thought, oh,
1550
01:14:42.020 --> 01:14:44.886
that's just basically a flat triangle.
1551
01:14:44.886 --> 01:14:48.630
And if I make a flat triangle rather than thinking
1552
01:14:48.630 --> 01:14:50.620
about that that's an eyelid,
1553
01:14:50.620 --> 01:14:54.410
and I really look at that just as the shape on its own...
1554
01:14:54.410 --> 01:14:58.100
As soon as I changed my thinking about what that form
1555
01:14:58.100 --> 01:15:01.010
was that I was trying to represent, I suddenly became
1556
01:15:01.010 --> 01:15:04.290
a lot more accurate with how I was getting that shape.
1557
01:15:04.290 --> 01:15:08.316
And also that the shape of his eyeball as well
1558
01:15:08.316 --> 01:15:10.163
as this kind of,
1559
01:15:13.510 --> 01:15:17.760
having this kind of a convex form that sits
1560
01:15:17.760 --> 01:15:21.060
underneath that eyelid and curves down.
1561
01:15:21.060 --> 01:15:26.060
And then this really lovely curve beneath his eyeball,
1562
01:15:27.700 --> 01:15:32.250
where you can sort of see the curve
1563
01:15:32.250 --> 01:15:35.100
of the eyeball underneath the eyelid and going
1564
01:15:35.100 --> 01:15:37.580
into his cheek and just really looking at the sort
1565
01:15:37.580 --> 01:15:39.360
of forms and the planes.
1566
01:15:39.360 --> 01:15:43.717
And another thing that is delightful
1567
01:15:43.717 --> 01:15:45.780
about carving with soap.
1568
01:15:45.780 --> 01:15:47.653
And I'll just put this back down.
1569
01:15:49.610 --> 01:15:51.940
See in my not entirely accurate
1570
01:15:53.060 --> 01:15:56.420
carving of Philip Parker King, is that because of the way
1571
01:15:56.420 --> 01:15:59.680
that the soap picks up light you don't need to do
1572
01:15:59.680 --> 01:16:04.200
a huge amount of carving to create a plane that gives
1573
01:16:04.200 --> 01:16:08.320
you a bit of a sense of the roundness of the cheek
1574
01:16:08.320 --> 01:16:12.870
or that little bit of his extra double chin under there,
1575
01:16:12.870 --> 01:16:17.589
that even just a tiny bit of a scrape her and there
1576
01:16:17.589 --> 01:16:20.750
changes the form and gives you that sort
1577
01:16:20.750 --> 01:16:24.600
of sense of the flesh, the fleshiness of the face.
1578
01:16:24.600 --> 01:16:26.327
And I was really impressed by that,
1579
01:16:26.327 --> 01:16:28.460
though I didn't need to go really
1580
01:16:28.460 --> 01:16:31.050
intensely three-dimensional with that carving,
1581
01:16:31.050 --> 01:16:32.970
I could just grab a tiny little bit away,
1582
01:16:32.970 --> 01:16:35.140
it would change the way the light hits it and it will
1583
01:16:35.140 --> 01:16:37.280
make it a bit more concave or a bit more convex.
1584
01:16:37.280 --> 01:16:39.640
And then it would give a sense of the sort
1585
01:16:39.640 --> 01:16:42.870
of movement over the surface of the skin.
1586
01:16:42.870 --> 01:16:46.891
And I think that that's something that I really
1587
01:16:46.891 --> 01:16:51.030
enjoyed playing around with,
1588
01:16:51.030 --> 01:16:56.030
both with Phillip Parker Kings chin and that sort of,
1589
01:16:56.150 --> 01:16:58.010
that fleshy bit underneath,
1590
01:16:58.010 --> 01:17:02.400
and also in this little one here, which is sort of,
1591
01:17:02.400 --> 01:17:06.175
I would say, inspired by Jane Franklin, but certainly
1592
01:17:06.175 --> 01:17:08.560
not an accurate representation,
1593
01:17:08.560 --> 01:17:11.120
but starting to kind of try and work out how to deal
1594
01:17:11.120 --> 01:17:16.120
with the form of the chin and the form underneath
1595
01:17:16.720 --> 01:17:19.951
her mouth by just really gently kind of carving
1596
01:17:19.951 --> 01:17:24.937
into that and getting that sense of where it protrudes
1597
01:17:24.937 --> 01:17:27.640
and catches the light.
1598
01:17:27.640 --> 01:17:29.510
And I think that's another thing that is always
1599
01:17:29.510 --> 01:17:32.490
incredibly difficult to do with...
1600
01:17:34.250 --> 01:17:36.300
Figurative sculptor is lips.
1601
01:17:36.300 --> 01:17:38.610
And you often see people trying to sculpt lips
1602
01:17:38.610 --> 01:17:40.506
where they sort of look like two sausages,
1603
01:17:40.506 --> 01:17:43.800
(laughs) and sort of an upper sausage and a lower sausage,
1604
01:17:43.800 --> 01:17:46.190
and sort of trying to really get that understanding
1605
01:17:46.190 --> 01:17:49.151
of that relationship between the nose and the mouth
1606
01:17:49.151 --> 01:17:52.394
and the way that the lips sort of cut in.
1607
01:17:52.394 --> 01:17:56.122
And I was really struggling with this one,
1608
01:17:56.122 --> 01:17:58.020
with the lips for quite a while,
1609
01:17:58.020 --> 01:18:00.937
until I made a similar discovery to the discovery
1610
01:18:00.937 --> 01:18:03.260
I made about the eyelid, which is, ah,
1611
01:18:03.260 --> 01:18:06.096
the bottom lip sort of sits underneath the upper lip.
1612
01:18:06.096 --> 01:18:09.867
And if I actually just carved out the bottom lip
1613
01:18:09.867 --> 01:18:12.180
and I pay attention to the bottom lip and I don't
1614
01:18:12.180 --> 01:18:16.029
think about the upper lip, the upper lip sort of forms as,
1615
01:18:16.029 --> 01:18:18.710
in result or in response to that.
1616
01:18:18.710 --> 01:18:21.610
So I concentrated on the bottom lip and then I could
1617
01:18:21.610 --> 01:18:24.010
just carve back to sort of shape the upper lip.
1618
01:18:24.010 --> 01:18:26.930
So this is little tricks that you can work
1619
01:18:26.930 --> 01:18:30.670
out just by questioning what you're seeing and trying
1620
01:18:30.670 --> 01:18:34.041
to move beyond those habits of how we think lips look
1621
01:18:34.041 --> 01:18:37.934
or how we think eyes and noses look to trying to see
1622
01:18:37.934 --> 01:18:40.490
it not as an eye or a nose or a mouth,
1623
01:18:40.490 --> 01:18:44.290
but as a form with shadow and light and trying
1624
01:18:44.290 --> 01:18:47.010
to follow where the shadows go or where the light goes.
1625
01:18:47.010 --> 01:18:51.000
And that helps to create that understanding
1626
01:18:51.000 --> 01:18:52.163
of the relationship.
1627
01:18:53.020 --> 01:18:54.880
I'm just gonna stop and have a sip of water.
1628
01:18:54.880 --> 01:18:56.420
One other question about whether you could use
1629
01:18:56.420 --> 01:19:00.885
soap sculptures as a mould to then cast on a longer
1630
01:19:00.885 --> 01:19:02.793
lasting material form?
1631
01:19:06.930 --> 01:19:08.980
I think you could definitely do that.
1632
01:19:08.980 --> 01:19:10.950
And there'd be a number of different ways
1633
01:19:10.950 --> 01:19:11.853
you could do that.
1634
01:19:13.160 --> 01:19:16.580
Probably the most straightforward would be with plaster.
1635
01:19:16.580 --> 01:19:19.690
And the nice thing about soap is plaster won't stick to it,
1636
01:19:19.690 --> 01:19:22.950
because the soap has this sort of waxy surface.
1637
01:19:22.950 --> 01:19:26.610
The one thing you'd need to be conscious of is to not
1638
01:19:26.610 --> 01:19:28.650
have very, very deep undercuts,
1639
01:19:28.650 --> 01:19:32.450
because if you made a little wall around your soap
1640
01:19:32.450 --> 01:19:34.030
block and poured plaster into it,
1641
01:19:34.030 --> 01:19:37.210
if you had very curved and undercut areas,
1642
01:19:37.210 --> 01:19:39.320
the plaster would go into that and then it would kind
1643
01:19:39.320 --> 01:19:40.283
of pull out.
1644
01:19:41.193 --> 01:19:45.560
But one thing a lot of people who do a lot of casting
1645
01:19:45.560 --> 01:19:48.410
will do if they've got a form that has those kinds
1646
01:19:48.410 --> 01:19:51.860
of undercuts in it is that they might fill
1647
01:19:51.860 --> 01:19:53.970
those in with a little bit of clay or something,
1648
01:19:53.970 --> 01:19:56.760
something that can be removed so you can make
1649
01:19:56.760 --> 01:20:00.240
your cast and then you can carve those undercuts back
1650
01:20:00.240 --> 01:20:01.626
in later on.
1651
01:20:01.626 --> 01:20:03.700
You could potentially use something like
1652
01:20:03.700 --> 01:20:05.563
Silicon or latex as well.
1653
01:20:05.563 --> 01:20:08.390
I don't see why you couldn't use one of those.
1654
01:20:08.390 --> 01:20:11.060
And if you use latex, for example,
1655
01:20:11.060 --> 01:20:15.630
you would paint a couple of layers of latex on,
1656
01:20:15.630 --> 01:20:17.870
and that would get the detail of Silicon.
1657
01:20:17.870 --> 01:20:19.980
And then you could put plaster over the top
1658
01:20:19.980 --> 01:20:22.720
which would give you the support structure.
1659
01:20:22.720 --> 01:20:26.720
So that then when you turn it inside, well,
1660
01:20:26.720 --> 01:20:28.160
when you take it off,
1661
01:20:28.160 --> 01:20:31.320
then you've got a soft mould that you could pour
1662
01:20:31.320 --> 01:20:34.320
plaster into, which means that you could peel
1663
01:20:34.320 --> 01:20:37.090
that soft mould off and you'd have
1664
01:20:39.007 --> 01:20:40.840
your positive coming out.
1665
01:20:40.840 --> 01:20:43.350
And so the soft mould then where you've got
1666
01:20:43.350 --> 01:20:45.900
the undercuts you can just kind of peel it away or pull
1667
01:20:45.900 --> 01:20:48.360
it out from those undercut sections.
1668
01:20:48.360 --> 01:20:52.320
So I'm, I haven't done much casting and it's been
1669
01:20:52.320 --> 01:20:54.400
a while since I've done any casting,
1670
01:20:54.400 --> 01:20:58.300
but I would certainly think it would be very possible
1671
01:20:58.300 --> 01:21:00.270
to cast, and that there would be a number
1672
01:21:00.270 --> 01:21:02.002
of different ways you could potentially,
1673
01:21:02.002 --> 01:21:04.040
different materials you could potentially use.
1674
01:21:04.040 --> 01:21:07.956
So a lot of people use that dental kind of gel stuff.
1675
01:21:07.956 --> 01:21:10.810
I think that would be a really easy medium also
1676
01:21:10.810 --> 01:21:12.051
to work with.
1677
01:21:12.051 --> 01:21:14.320
And if you use that to create your negative then
1678
01:21:14.320 --> 01:21:17.340
you could pour plaster or even wax into the positive
1679
01:21:17.340 --> 01:21:19.250
and make a positive wax.
1680
01:21:19.250 --> 01:21:23.360
And some of the objects in your collection are cast wax.
1681
01:21:23.360 --> 01:21:24.730
So they would have been...
1682
01:21:24.730 --> 01:21:28.360
I speculate they would have been made in clay first.
1683
01:21:28.360 --> 01:21:30.180
Then they would have been cast in plaster and then
1684
01:21:30.180 --> 01:21:34.470
they would have poured the molten wax
1685
01:21:34.470 --> 01:21:39.470
into the plaster mould and used a sort of wax plaster combo,
1686
01:21:40.420 --> 01:21:41.680
because I don't,
1687
01:21:41.680 --> 01:21:45.790
I suspect they didn't have dental gel in 1800s.
1688
01:21:45.790 --> 01:21:50.170
So wax and plaster and clay I think would be
1689
01:21:50.170 --> 01:21:52.630
the main materials that they were working backwards
1690
01:21:52.630 --> 01:21:53.528
and forwards between.
1691
01:21:53.528 --> 01:21:57.400
Possibly there might have been originals that were
1692
01:21:57.400 --> 01:21:59.360
carved in something like marble
1693
01:21:59.360 --> 01:22:01.480
and then reproductions made.
1694
01:22:01.480 --> 01:22:04.596
A lot of colonial sculptors were making multiples
1695
01:22:04.596 --> 01:22:07.310
and selling them as a way of making a living.
1696
01:22:07.310 --> 01:22:11.130
So there's very famous sculptures
1697
01:22:11.130 --> 01:22:13.230
that the portrait gallery own copies of,
1698
01:22:13.230 --> 01:22:15.220
and also the national gallery have of,
1699
01:22:15.220 --> 01:22:19.730
the Tasmanian's Truganini and Moretti were made
1700
01:22:19.730 --> 01:22:21.580
as multiples and sold.
1701
01:22:21.580 --> 01:22:25.240
And in fact, Phillip Parker King was sculpted
1702
01:22:25.240 --> 01:22:28.140
by Thomas Wallner who was a pre-Raphaelite artist
1703
01:22:28.140 --> 01:22:30.420
who came out to Australia in the gold rush,
1704
01:22:30.420 --> 01:22:33.070
hoping to make his fortune in gold.
1705
01:22:33.070 --> 01:22:35.770
And instead he made a living making portraits,
1706
01:22:35.770 --> 01:22:39.500
because he didn't find gold and make his fortune.
1707
01:22:39.500 --> 01:22:41.240
And I think he did end up going back
1708
01:22:41.240 --> 01:22:45.150
to the UK, and anyone who travelled to Canberra to see
1709
01:22:45.150 --> 01:22:46.790
the pre-Raphaelite exhibition at the national
1710
01:22:46.790 --> 01:22:48.629
gallery would have seen some of his paintings
1711
01:22:48.629 --> 01:22:50.010
in that exhibition.
1712
01:22:50.010 --> 01:22:51.820
So he was one of the,
1713
01:22:51.820 --> 01:22:53.170
I think one of the founding members
1714
01:22:53.170 --> 01:22:54.250
of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood,
1715
01:22:54.250 --> 01:22:56.970
I can't remember the exact story.
1716
01:22:56.970 --> 01:22:59.455
So in his case,
1717
01:22:59.455 --> 01:23:03.500
the portraiture work was really his bread and butter
1718
01:23:03.500 --> 01:23:07.280
work and that, making a living, making,
1719
01:23:07.280 --> 01:23:12.260
working to commission, people commissioning portraits,
1720
01:23:12.260 --> 01:23:13.910
which is pretty much the way, you know,
1721
01:23:13.910 --> 01:23:17.000
portraiture continues to be treated today.
1722
01:23:17.000 --> 01:23:18.710
Today the National Portrait Gallery commissions
1723
01:23:18.710 --> 01:23:20.570
portraits of well-known Australians in all sorts
1724
01:23:20.570 --> 01:23:23.540
of different media, our parliamentarians get
1725
01:23:23.540 --> 01:23:24.630
their portraits painted.
1726
01:23:24.630 --> 01:23:29.380
So portrait painters have this kind of income stream
1727
01:23:29.380 --> 01:23:31.930
that comes from that kind of commissioned work,
1728
01:23:31.930 --> 01:23:34.920
which is quite different to a lot of other
1729
01:23:34.920 --> 01:23:37.010
contemporary artists, painters, sculptors,
1730
01:23:37.010 --> 01:23:38.470
who are sort of working on,
1731
01:23:38.470 --> 01:23:40.990
making bodies of work and then trying to find
1732
01:23:40.990 --> 01:23:42.610
an audience or someone to sell it.
1733
01:23:42.610 --> 01:23:46.640
Portraiture is often created as a commission.
1734
01:23:46.640 --> 01:23:48.447
It's the person coming to the artists and saying
1735
01:23:48.447 --> 01:23:50.435
we want you to make this, or I need that.
1736
01:23:50.435 --> 01:23:54.285
And artists that paint portraits that are not commissions,
1737
01:23:54.285 --> 01:23:56.500
it's incredibly difficult work to sell,
1738
01:23:56.500 --> 01:23:58.670
because it's some particular person.
1739
01:23:58.670 --> 01:24:01.710
And so there's not really a market for people
1740
01:24:01.710 --> 01:24:04.530
to collect portraiture unless they have some kind
1741
01:24:04.530 --> 01:24:07.382
of a connection to the person who the portrait has
1742
01:24:07.382 --> 01:24:09.560
been created of.
1743
01:24:09.560 --> 01:24:10.393
So I think that's very...
1744
01:24:10.393 --> 01:24:12.190
I'd be really interested to know if there are people
1745
01:24:12.190 --> 01:24:13.210
out there collecting portraits,
1746
01:24:13.210 --> 01:24:15.020
just collecting portraits because they think
1747
01:24:15.020 --> 01:24:16.230
portraits are interesting.
1748
01:24:16.230 --> 01:24:17.580
So maybe we could,
1749
01:24:17.580 --> 01:24:20.363
someone could let us know if they have
1750
01:24:20.363 --> 01:24:22.070
active portrait collecting.
1751
01:24:22.070 --> 01:24:23.760
Yeah. Yeah.
1752
01:24:23.760 --> 01:24:26.930
And I also sat for a portrait painting class
1753
01:24:26.930 --> 01:24:27.810
here a couple of years
1754
01:24:27.810 --> 01:24:31.100
ago and watching that process of painting portraits
1755
01:24:31.100 --> 01:24:32.650
is really fascinating too.
1756
01:24:32.650 --> 01:24:35.240
So, and it's very weird when you see a class full
1757
01:24:35.240 --> 01:24:37.208
of not entirely accurate paintings.
1758
01:24:37.208 --> 01:24:42.208
(laughs) It can be quite confronting at times,
1759
01:24:44.560 --> 01:24:47.040
but, yeah, I'm wondering,
1760
01:24:47.040 --> 01:24:48.660
we've still got quite a lot of time
1761
01:24:48.660 --> 01:24:52.152
left and I wanna make sure that people who are
1762
01:24:52.152 --> 01:24:55.758
there have enough information to go on with,
1763
01:24:55.758 --> 01:24:58.400
because I know that this is a very mesmerising thing
1764
01:24:58.400 --> 01:25:01.020
and I just like to give people a chance to do
1765
01:25:01.020 --> 01:25:02.960
whatever they're doing, but also if they're wanting
1766
01:25:02.960 --> 01:25:06.159
more information or techniques or feedback or prompts
1767
01:25:06.159 --> 01:25:11.159
or a new thing to look at and to work from, with,
1768
01:25:12.330 --> 01:25:14.390
we could look at some more close-ups or we could
1769
01:25:14.390 --> 01:25:16.980
just continue on with what we've got up on the screen.
1770
01:25:16.980 --> 01:25:18.686
Sort of see how people are tracking.
1771
01:25:18.686 --> 01:25:21.800
We did have a question about whether you would
1772
01:25:21.800 --> 01:25:24.643
consider using the soap carving as a stamp.
1773
01:25:25.784 --> 01:25:29.830
Ooh, I don't know.
1774
01:25:29.830 --> 01:25:32.750
I don't know how it would work because if something like
1775
01:25:32.750 --> 01:25:34.745
a rubber stamp, there's flexibility,
1776
01:25:34.745 --> 01:25:39.170
so that when you stamp, what it, if you're using ink,
1777
01:25:39.170 --> 01:25:41.930
you've got something that will meet the surface
1778
01:25:41.930 --> 01:25:45.800
and connect with it, whereas the soap is a hard surface,
1779
01:25:45.800 --> 01:25:49.542
but you could, I guess if you think of it the way
1780
01:25:49.542 --> 01:25:53.110
that a seal works, like, you know,
1781
01:25:53.110 --> 01:25:56.640
a seal ring or a pendant that you put in sealing wax
1782
01:25:56.640 --> 01:26:01.640
and you create a kind of a marker or a stamp that way,
1783
01:26:02.710 --> 01:26:04.300
or the those kinds
1784
01:26:04.300 --> 01:26:09.300
of the stamps that the little
1785
01:26:10.390 --> 01:26:11.970
blocks that ceramicists use,
1786
01:26:11.970 --> 01:26:14.110
where they've got a piece of timber or something
1787
01:26:14.110 --> 01:26:15.850
that they've carved into and they stamp
1788
01:26:15.850 --> 01:26:18.040
it into the bottom of their clay objects.
1789
01:26:18.040 --> 01:26:21.420
So you could, I guess, use carved soap
1790
01:26:21.420 --> 01:26:25.980
to make some kind of an indent into clay
1791
01:26:25.980 --> 01:26:28.890
or a softer substance that would work like a stamp.
1792
01:26:28.890 --> 01:26:30.290
So yeah...
1793
01:26:30.290 --> 01:26:34.080
I don't know if it would work in the way
1794
01:26:34.080 --> 01:26:37.770
that you could work with like monoprints,
1795
01:26:37.770 --> 01:26:39.604
where if you put some ink or something on the surface
1796
01:26:39.604 --> 01:26:41.880
and then you got a soft paper,
1797
01:26:41.880 --> 01:26:44.400
like rice paper and kind of rubbed it over the surface,
1798
01:26:44.400 --> 01:26:46.890
if that would give you anything or if it wouldn't
1799
01:26:46.890 --> 01:26:49.880
really work, because mostly with printmaking surfaces,
1800
01:26:49.880 --> 01:26:53.266
they're very, very flat, and this is not a flat surface.
1801
01:26:53.266 --> 01:26:56.273
I guess that's where it would work is if you had
1802
01:26:56.273 --> 01:26:58.091
a piece of soap,
1803
01:26:58.091 --> 01:27:01.416
a flat surface and you carved
1804
01:27:01.416 --> 01:27:05.100
into it without creating that more moulded sort
1805
01:27:05.100 --> 01:27:06.040
of three-dimensional form.
1806
01:27:06.040 --> 01:27:07.470
Like, in fact, this,
1807
01:27:07.470 --> 01:27:10.370
the brand that's been stamped into the soap.
1808
01:27:10.370 --> 01:27:14.790
If I rolled ink across this and stamped it, I would get
1809
01:27:14.790 --> 01:27:17.730
a negative where the text has been carved in.
1810
01:27:17.730 --> 01:27:21.483
So that would work as a kind of stamp. Hmm.
1811
01:27:23.400 --> 01:27:25.970
Somebody else, I was about to say Galaxy,
1812
01:27:25.970 --> 01:27:28.543
just asked, but it's the name of their tablet.
1813
01:27:28.543 --> 01:27:30.340
(both laugh)
1814
01:27:30.340 --> 01:27:32.884
Sorry, sorry, whoever owns the Galaxy tablet.
1815
01:27:32.884 --> 01:27:35.620
They were wondering how you get such a lovely sheen
1816
01:27:35.620 --> 01:27:36.880
on the finished work.
1817
01:27:36.880 --> 01:27:37.713
Mm.
1818
01:27:39.840 --> 01:27:41.930
I don't do anything special.
1819
01:27:41.930 --> 01:27:45.250
It's really just working with these tools
1820
01:27:45.250 --> 01:27:48.990
and it's just scraping very lightly.
1821
01:27:48.990 --> 01:27:53.990
So that it's quite a smooth surface
1822
01:27:55.260 --> 01:27:56.600
and this is quite
1823
01:27:56.600 --> 01:27:59.530
a sharp edge, but I think even with a less sharp edge,
1824
01:27:59.530 --> 01:28:02.840
it's just that very, very light scraping off
1825
01:28:02.840 --> 01:28:04.610
over the surface.
1826
01:28:04.610 --> 01:28:08.570
But the soap itself just has inherently has that kind
1827
01:28:08.570 --> 01:28:10.470
of shiny quality about it.
1828
01:28:10.470 --> 01:28:12.130
And if you look at,
1829
01:28:12.130 --> 01:28:15.253
these are two different pieces of soap side to side,
1830
01:28:17.350 --> 01:28:21.430
the lighter or the whiter one is a slightly more
1831
01:28:21.430 --> 01:28:26.270
powdery texture and the darker one is a bit more waxy.
1832
01:28:26.270 --> 01:28:28.110
So they have, they sort of take the light
1833
01:28:28.110 --> 01:28:29.520
in a slightly different way,
1834
01:28:29.520 --> 01:28:32.770
but it's really just carving very gently like
1835
01:28:32.770 --> 01:28:36.269
this or scraping very gently over the surface to take
1836
01:28:36.269 --> 01:28:41.269
out some of those more bumpy ridged areas.
1837
01:28:41.500 --> 01:28:44.880
That's what creates the smooth surface there.
1838
01:28:44.880 --> 01:28:48.590
So I'm not kind of wetting it
1839
01:28:48.590 --> 01:28:53.210
or burnishing it,
1840
01:28:53.210 --> 01:28:57.360
although you could potentially burnish the way people
1841
01:28:57.360 --> 01:29:01.100
work with burnishing ceramics as well.
1842
01:29:01.100 --> 01:29:03.273
And I'm just, these tools are a bit,
1843
01:29:03.273 --> 01:29:05.820
they're still got bits of remnant wax on them
1844
01:29:05.820 --> 01:29:06.653
from working with wax.
1845
01:29:06.653 --> 01:29:08.290
But if I took that curved,
1846
01:29:08.290 --> 01:29:11.303
the curved part and sort of scraped it,
1847
01:29:12.290 --> 01:29:14.110
that would give a different kind of surface
1848
01:29:14.110 --> 01:29:16.030
too, that might burnish it a little bit.
1849
01:29:16.030 --> 01:29:17.380
I haven't actually ever tried this.
1850
01:29:17.380 --> 01:29:20.370
So it'd be interesting to sort of see what happens
1851
01:29:20.370 --> 01:29:22.830
if that makes it a smoother surface.
1852
01:29:22.830 --> 01:29:25.813
It does appear to be burnishing it a little bit.
1853
01:29:28.040 --> 01:29:31.800
But yeah, the surfaces of these are purely created
1854
01:29:31.800 --> 01:29:34.120
with that scraping of this,
1855
01:29:34.120 --> 01:29:35.710
the flat blade or the curved blade.
1856
01:29:35.710 --> 01:29:36.543
And that's it.
1857
01:29:40.033 --> 01:29:44.530
Nice to see people working still all the way over there.
1858
01:29:44.530 --> 01:29:46.150
I've had a couple of people who've had to leave
1859
01:29:46.150 --> 01:29:48.130
but they're gonna go on with it.
1860
01:29:48.130 --> 01:29:48.963
Oh, good.
1861
01:29:48.963 --> 01:29:51.503
Thank you very much for the tips.
1862
01:30:00.070 --> 01:30:02.462
Are there any other questions from the Facebook team
1863
01:30:02.462 --> 01:30:04.390
or from Zoom?
1864
01:30:04.390 --> 01:30:05.410
Please let us know.
1865
01:30:25.100 --> 01:30:29.120
So I would very much enjoy seeing the results
1866
01:30:29.120 --> 01:30:31.540
of what people make today and even afterwards, you know,
1867
01:30:31.540 --> 01:30:34.620
if they share things,
1868
01:30:34.620 --> 01:30:37.619
I guess they can share things by a Facebook or tag
1869
01:30:37.619 --> 01:30:39.113
the portrait gallery on Instagram.
1870
01:30:39.113 --> 01:30:42.360
It'd be really interesting to see what people have come up
1871
01:30:42.360 --> 01:30:43.840
with after today's session.
1872
01:30:43.840 --> 01:30:45.002
Absolutely.
1873
01:30:45.002 --> 01:30:46.900
And if anyone's a little bit shy and doesn't wanna send
1874
01:30:46.900 --> 01:30:49.380
it out to the social media land,
1875
01:30:49.380 --> 01:30:54.380
you can always email us through bookings@mpg.gov.edu
1876
01:30:54.520 --> 01:30:57.210
and we can share your creations with Ellis afterwards.
1877
01:30:57.210 --> 01:31:00.153
Oh, that would be fantastic. I'd love to see what happens.
1878
01:31:04.020 --> 01:31:07.780
I think one of the key aspects or elements
1879
01:31:07.780 --> 01:31:11.303
about portraiture in any form,
1880
01:31:11.303 --> 01:31:13.990
drawing, carving, painting is just that sort
1881
01:31:13.990 --> 01:31:16.500
of continuously going back and looking at it again
1882
01:31:16.500 --> 01:31:19.190
and correcting and sort of like, ah,
1883
01:31:19.190 --> 01:31:20.960
that the angle's not quite right.
1884
01:31:20.960 --> 01:31:24.520
I'm just gonna shift the angle of the nose or the face's
1885
01:31:24.520 --> 01:31:26.160
a bit longer than it needs to be.
1886
01:31:26.160 --> 01:31:29.130
So I'm gonna come back in and chop a bit off the bottom
1887
01:31:29.130 --> 01:31:31.030
of the chin or I'm gonna
1888
01:31:31.030 --> 01:31:34.290
make the throat a bit more slopey.
1889
01:31:34.290 --> 01:31:36.540
So it's just that constantly backwards and forwards
1890
01:31:36.540 --> 01:31:38.570
of kind of critically analysing
1891
01:31:38.570 --> 01:31:42.510
what's there and correcting it and working with it.
1892
01:31:42.510 --> 01:31:47.510
And then slowly over time getting kind of a closer
1893
01:31:48.321 --> 01:31:51.070
and closer representation.
1894
01:31:51.070 --> 01:31:53.596
And that can be really satisfying,
1895
01:31:53.596 --> 01:31:58.596
but equally you can just look at the original image
1896
01:31:59.283 --> 01:32:01.440
or the original work that you're looking
1897
01:32:01.440 --> 01:32:02.603
at as a starting point.
1898
01:32:02.603 --> 01:32:07.603
And then from there play with it, get creative,
1899
01:32:08.790 --> 01:32:10.090
do something else.
1900
01:32:10.090 --> 01:32:13.210
So you can go down that path of really honing
1901
01:32:13.210 --> 01:32:14.890
those representational skills.
1902
01:32:14.890 --> 01:32:17.966
You can also go down that path of what,
1903
01:32:17.966 --> 01:32:19.090
where can I take this now?
1904
01:32:19.090 --> 01:32:20.430
What else could I do with it?
1905
01:32:20.430 --> 01:32:23.370
And use it just as a starting point and a point
1906
01:32:23.370 --> 01:32:27.973
of inspiration and then continuing on.
1907
01:32:31.710 --> 01:32:34.940
And I've just, I've gone back to Lady Grey
1908
01:32:34.940 --> 01:32:37.430
who I started on this morning,
1909
01:32:37.430 --> 01:32:42.430
and I'm making
1910
01:32:42.730 --> 01:32:44.400
her nose much bigger and pointier
1911
01:32:44.400 --> 01:32:45.420
than it actually is.
1912
01:32:45.420 --> 01:32:48.363
So I might just kind of try and correct that.
1913
01:32:52.000 --> 01:32:53.650
And there's always that risk that, you know,
1914
01:32:53.650 --> 01:32:55.790
if you're starting to take something off that you take
1915
01:32:55.790 --> 01:32:57.620
too much off and then you're back to square one.
1916
01:32:57.620 --> 01:33:01.620
So we might be... (laughs)
1917
01:33:03.730 --> 01:33:07.970
I was telling the group that I was working
1918
01:33:07.970 --> 01:33:09.640
with this morning about someone that I went
1919
01:33:09.640 --> 01:33:11.290
to art school with.
1920
01:33:11.290 --> 01:33:13.290
And that's the other thing that I got to do
1921
01:33:13.290 --> 01:33:15.290
in my very traditional sculpture training at art
1922
01:33:15.290 --> 01:33:17.491
school was carving in marble,
1923
01:33:17.491 --> 01:33:21.780
and our first exercise carving in marble,
1924
01:33:21.780 --> 01:33:26.126
we were given metal chisels and big hammers
1925
01:33:26.126 --> 01:33:29.890
and we spent weeks bashing away at these big pieces
1926
01:33:29.890 --> 01:33:32.634
of marble and chipping tiny little bits off the surface.
1927
01:33:32.634 --> 01:33:35.730
And once we'd tortured ourselves like that for a while,
1928
01:33:35.730 --> 01:33:37.990
then we were allowed to move on to the pneumatic power,
1929
01:33:37.990 --> 01:33:40.230
air powered power tools, where it was like
1930
01:33:44.770 --> 01:33:47.030
sort of a hammer drill and you could go dah-dah-dah
1931
01:33:47.030 --> 01:33:47.897
and you can hammer into it.
1932
01:33:47.897 --> 01:33:51.430
But one of the people in my sculpture class decided
1933
01:33:51.430 --> 01:33:55.780
that rather than get the precious white smallish chunk
1934
01:33:55.780 --> 01:33:58.373
of marble, that they would work with sandstone
1935
01:33:58.373 --> 01:34:01.060
because it's much faster and you can learn
1936
01:34:01.060 --> 01:34:02.330
more more quickly.
1937
01:34:02.330 --> 01:34:03.840
So they had a piece of sand stone.
1938
01:34:03.840 --> 01:34:05.515
That was a huge big piece,
1939
01:34:05.515 --> 01:34:08.140
while all of us with our smaller bits of marble,
1940
01:34:08.140 --> 01:34:10.110
and they chipped away, and chipped away, and chipped away
1941
01:34:10.110 --> 01:34:10.943
at the sandstone.
1942
01:34:10.943 --> 01:34:12.620
And then they chipped it in half and they had two
1943
01:34:12.620 --> 01:34:14.247
pieces and they chipped away, chipped away,
1944
01:34:14.247 --> 01:34:16.390
and they made all these different shapes at the end
1945
01:34:16.390 --> 01:34:18.240
of the semester, they had a pile of rubble
1946
01:34:18.240 --> 01:34:19.988
and nothing else.
1947
01:34:19.988 --> 01:34:22.510
I think they learnt more than anyone else
1948
01:34:22.510 --> 01:34:26.320
in the class about carving, but I've seen,
1949
01:34:26.320 --> 01:34:28.650
I've done the same thing myself with the soaps.
1950
01:34:28.650 --> 01:34:30.270
I'll just take a bit off here and take a bit off
1951
01:34:30.270 --> 01:34:31.103
there and take a bit off here.
1952
01:34:31.103 --> 01:34:33.971
And all of a sudden I've taken way too much off
1953
01:34:33.971 --> 01:34:36.879
where I've dug a huge big hole for myself,
1954
01:34:36.879 --> 01:34:40.030
but in the process of doing that, it's not,
1955
01:34:40.030 --> 01:34:41.610
I don't think that's a loss,
1956
01:34:41.610 --> 01:34:46.610
because that constantly working,
1957
01:34:47.030 --> 01:34:49.100
you're storing all of that information.
1958
01:34:49.100 --> 01:34:50.990
And then the next time you make something you can
1959
01:34:50.990 --> 01:34:52.310
apply what you've learnt.
1960
01:34:52.310 --> 01:34:55.400
So if you end up with nothing at the end
1961
01:34:55.400 --> 01:34:57.740
of today's session, you still will have learnt
1962
01:34:57.740 --> 01:34:59.900
some skills or you've made some observations
1963
01:34:59.900 --> 01:35:01.720
that you can apply to the next thing you make.
1964
01:35:01.720 --> 01:35:03.960
And it doesn't mean that you'll necessarily always end
1965
01:35:03.960 --> 01:35:05.850
up with a pile of rubble at the end,
1966
01:35:05.850 --> 01:35:09.893
you can move on to having an object at the end rather
1967
01:35:09.893 --> 01:35:12.870
than a beautiful pile of soap flakes which you can use
1968
01:35:12.870 --> 01:35:14.223
to wash your clothes.
1969
01:35:14.223 --> 01:35:18.253
So it's not a complete loss. (laughs)
1970
01:35:27.560 --> 01:35:29.850
One of the things that's particularly tricky too
1971
01:35:29.850 --> 01:35:34.850
about some of these really gorgeous images is that,
1972
01:35:35.170 --> 01:35:38.928
particularly Lady Grey, the photographs of her,
1973
01:35:38.928 --> 01:35:42.203
because she's a low relief made out of wax,
1974
01:35:42.203 --> 01:35:44.520
it's quite hard to see her features.
1975
01:35:44.520 --> 01:35:46.720
So that this is another one where I'll just put
1976
01:35:46.720 --> 01:35:50.139
this down on the table where I've actually got
1977
01:35:50.139 --> 01:35:53.140
a pencil and drawn around her profile,
1978
01:35:53.140 --> 01:35:55.660
just so I can see that relationship between her nose
1979
01:35:55.660 --> 01:35:57.642
and her mouth and her chin.
1980
01:35:57.642 --> 01:36:01.053
That's quite difficult to read looking at the image
1981
01:36:01.053 --> 01:36:03.863
as it's printed out.
1982
01:36:05.060 --> 01:36:09.410
So that's very helpful in just kind of getting a sense
1983
01:36:09.410 --> 01:36:12.590
of the composition or the shape.
1984
01:36:12.590 --> 01:36:15.024
And in fact, now that I've had that thought
1985
01:36:15.024 --> 01:36:17.920
that I could just print out a piece at the scale
1986
01:36:17.920 --> 01:36:19.230
of the piece of soap and trace it,
1987
01:36:19.230 --> 01:36:20.630
I'm gonna give that a try too,
1988
01:36:20.630 --> 01:36:25.630
because some people might see that a bit as cheating,
1989
01:36:26.860 --> 01:36:28.463
but I think it's also,
1990
01:36:30.465 --> 01:36:34.409
there's really no problem with just finding
1991
01:36:34.409 --> 01:36:37.990
a good technique to get the results you want,
1992
01:36:37.990 --> 01:36:42.630
even if that means you're not doing that kind
1993
01:36:42.630 --> 01:36:46.510
of accurate sort of rendering from one thing to the other,
1994
01:36:46.510 --> 01:36:49.260
but you're tracing it or you're creating a copy of it.
1995
01:36:49.260 --> 01:36:53.290
I think any technique that is useful to get
1996
01:36:53.290 --> 01:36:55.460
the results you want is worth giving a go.
1997
01:36:55.460 --> 01:36:58.993
it's not a case of it's cheating if you traced it.
1998
01:37:03.960 --> 01:37:04.960
And it's always, I think,
1999
01:37:04.960 --> 01:37:09.230
quite fascinating to see how different artists do
2000
01:37:09.230 --> 01:37:13.722
generate their work and when they might take photos
2001
01:37:13.722 --> 01:37:16.214
and work from photographs or when they might
2002
01:37:16.214 --> 01:37:19.330
use projections and trace things onto projections,
2003
01:37:19.330 --> 01:37:21.640
because there's all sorts of technologies
2004
01:37:21.640 --> 01:37:26.190
and techniques we can use to get the results we wanna get.
2005
01:37:26.190 --> 01:37:29.260
And I think it's worth making use of any of them
2006
01:37:29.260 --> 01:37:33.383
that are worth, that give you those results.
2007
01:38:02.960 --> 01:38:04.910
So how are people going?
2008
01:38:04.910 --> 01:38:08.020
Does anyone wanna show us what they're working on?
2009
01:38:08.020 --> 01:38:12.000
Any work in progress happening up there? I can see one.
2010
01:38:12.000 --> 01:38:16.203
Oh, ah, nice! That's looking fantastic.
2011
01:38:18.550 --> 01:38:23.460
Get a really clear look at that face.
2012
01:38:23.460 --> 01:38:24.293
Yeah.
2013
01:38:31.940 --> 01:38:36.870
I would, I think I'd love to make a video just of lots
2014
01:38:36.870 --> 01:38:40.000
of people working because it's just it's very
2015
01:38:40.000 --> 01:38:43.230
mesmerising to watch other people concentrating, isn't it?
2016
01:38:43.230 --> 01:38:45.080
Absolutely. There you go.
2017
01:38:47.770 --> 01:38:49.770
Oh, look at that.
2018
01:38:49.770 --> 01:38:51.540
Ah.
Fantastic.
2019
01:38:51.540 --> 01:38:52.413
That's great!
2020
01:38:53.390 --> 01:38:58.023
Well done. It's terrific.
2021
01:38:59.890 --> 01:39:01.271
So we've got people working-
2022
01:39:01.271 --> 01:39:03.557
Oh, here's we've got the wax block again.
2023
01:39:05.240 --> 01:39:06.370
There we go.
2024
01:39:06.370 --> 01:39:08.930
And the iPhone light behind is really great too.
2025
01:39:08.930 --> 01:39:12.200
Yeah. That's a really good little technique.
2026
01:39:12.200 --> 01:39:15.000
Yep. Seeing how the relief, that's terrific.
2027
01:39:16.070 --> 01:39:18.140
I'm liking how you're attacking the fur
2028
01:39:18.140 --> 01:39:20.618
of that animal too.
2029
01:39:20.618 --> 01:39:21.518
It's looking good.
2030
01:39:26.610 --> 01:39:31.466
I'm curious to see Shayne's efforts too at some point he...
2031
01:39:31.466 --> 01:39:32.930
(everybody laughs)
2032
01:39:32.930 --> 01:39:33.763
Oh, come on.
2033
01:39:33.763 --> 01:39:36.393
We're amongst friends.
(indistinct)
2034
01:40:28.000 --> 01:40:30.430
I think I'm just gonna become completely
2035
01:40:30.430 --> 01:40:31.880
obsessed with noses.
2036
01:40:31.880 --> 01:40:35.030
That's the thing that I'm finding absolutely
2037
01:40:35.030 --> 01:40:37.703
fascinating is trying to get people's noses right.
2038
01:40:40.560 --> 01:40:42.410
Is there a particular lighting that you like
2039
01:40:42.410 --> 01:40:44.700
to work with when you're carving?
2040
01:40:44.700 --> 01:40:46.790
You say that you often work into the evening?
2041
01:40:46.790 --> 01:40:47.623
Yeah.
2042
01:40:47.623 --> 01:40:52.581
I usually have a desk lamp on the desk and often
2043
01:40:52.581 --> 01:40:55.800
it's not a direct overhead light,
2044
01:40:55.800 --> 01:40:57.970
but it's a light coming from the side so that I can
2045
01:40:57.970 --> 01:41:01.339
sort of see those shadows and it can be sometimes
2046
01:41:01.339 --> 01:41:04.790
a case of holding the work up vertically or sort
2047
01:41:04.790 --> 01:41:05.870
of moving it around.
2048
01:41:05.870 --> 01:41:10.870
So a really kind of even wash over the work
2049
01:41:11.720 --> 01:41:14.380
doesn't necessarily help, but something that's a bit
2050
01:41:14.380 --> 01:41:16.840
more directional creates a bit of contrast,
2051
01:41:16.840 --> 01:41:19.420
so a sort of a raking light or a slanted light,
2052
01:41:19.420 --> 01:41:21.520
then you can kind of see the shadows
2053
01:41:21.520 --> 01:41:23.253
and understand the forms.
2054
01:41:24.670 --> 01:41:27.530
So yeah, sometimes working at night time in a room
2055
01:41:27.530 --> 01:41:30.730
that's not super bright but with a lamp can create
2056
01:41:30.730 --> 01:41:32.970
more exaggerated shadows.
2057
01:41:32.970 --> 01:41:34.920
And as long as it's not so dim
2058
01:41:34.920 --> 01:41:36.680
that it's generating eyestrain,
2059
01:41:36.680 --> 01:41:40.570
it sort of seems to work pretty well to work like that.
2060
01:41:40.570 --> 01:41:45.570
But also good amounts of daylight is always wonderful.
2061
01:41:47.410 --> 01:41:48.420
It's so much.
2062
01:41:48.420 --> 01:41:52.122
And I find, and I'm sure many people who have reached
2063
01:41:52.122 --> 01:41:55.320
a certain age and have always had good eyesight.
2064
01:41:55.320 --> 01:41:57.136
And then they've got the old age
2065
01:41:57.136 --> 01:42:00.801
eyesight decline happening that I can see a lot less
2066
01:42:00.801 --> 01:42:02.960
at night time than I used to be able to.
2067
01:42:02.960 --> 01:42:07.960
And so I'm working under brighter lights and making
2068
01:42:08.920 --> 01:42:11.750
sure that the lights are bright enough is really
2069
01:42:11.750 --> 01:42:12.980
important for me.
2070
01:42:12.980 --> 01:42:16.880
And I haven't quite adjusted to my lack of eyesight yet.
2071
01:42:16.880 --> 01:42:20.240
So I will often find that I forget to make
2072
01:42:20.240 --> 01:42:22.150
the lighting bright enough and then I'll turn a light
2073
01:42:22.150 --> 01:42:25.903
off or on or I'll add a lamp and suddenly I can see,
2074
01:42:25.903 --> 01:42:29.010
and I didn't even realise I couldn't see before that point.
2075
01:42:29.010 --> 01:42:33.630
So a good amount of light is always helpful.
2076
01:42:33.630 --> 01:42:35.880
And then that directional light can just give a bit
2077
01:42:35.880 --> 01:42:37.223
of extra information.
2078
01:42:39.240 --> 01:42:40.520
You were saying before that you're really
2079
01:42:40.520 --> 01:42:42.130
enjoying working into noses,
2080
01:42:42.130 --> 01:42:44.086
but is there a good part of the head or face to start
2081
01:42:44.086 --> 01:42:46.210
from in your opinion?
2082
01:42:46.210 --> 01:42:48.920
Oh, I think it really depends on the angle.
2083
01:42:48.920 --> 01:42:52.583
So with that, the working on profile,
2084
01:42:54.800 --> 01:42:58.210
I think it's just getting the whole profile,
2085
01:42:58.210 --> 01:43:01.860
and there's a lot of similar techniques you can
2086
01:43:01.860 --> 01:43:04.510
use as you would with drawing.
2087
01:43:04.510 --> 01:43:07.670
And I'm going to go back to Mr. Parker King and put
2088
01:43:07.670 --> 01:43:11.650
this image back on the table here,
2089
01:43:11.650 --> 01:43:15.300
is I'll often do something like look at the profile
2090
01:43:15.300 --> 01:43:18.234
and I'll just sort of kind of work out what the angle
2091
01:43:18.234 --> 01:43:23.234
of the face is so I could potentially draw a line like this,
2092
01:43:26.980 --> 01:43:30.920
so I can see that his, underneath his nose,
2093
01:43:30.920 --> 01:43:33.030
his upper lip and his bottom lip
2094
01:43:33.030 --> 01:43:35.910
in his chin are all on a particular slant.
2095
01:43:35.910 --> 01:43:39.350
And then his brow is on another angle.
2096
01:43:39.350 --> 01:43:40.683
So sort of doing that,
2097
01:43:41.540 --> 01:43:44.170
you know, that you see people doing in life
2098
01:43:44.170 --> 01:43:45.700
drawing classes where they hold their pencil up
2099
01:43:45.700 --> 01:43:47.370
and they look at it and they turn it to the right
2100
01:43:47.370 --> 01:43:50.660
angle and then they translate that to the same angle
2101
01:43:50.660 --> 01:43:55.660
on their drawing, working out the overall shape first
2102
01:43:56.120 --> 01:43:57.500
and then working back.
2103
01:43:57.500 --> 01:44:02.250
So it sort of blocking out those angles and being able
2104
01:44:02.250 --> 01:44:03.990
to kind of get the proportions.
2105
01:44:03.990 --> 01:44:07.250
And I think proportion is one of the things
2106
01:44:07.250 --> 01:44:11.120
that people always find difficult when life drawing
2107
01:44:11.120 --> 01:44:13.745
or creating portraits, is not making a nose
2108
01:44:13.745 --> 01:44:17.250
that's much bigger than the rest of the face or eyes
2109
01:44:17.250 --> 01:44:21.260
that are really tiny or those kinds of relationships.
2110
01:44:21.260 --> 01:44:23.840
So it's not so much starting in one place,
2111
01:44:23.840 --> 01:44:27.440
but I guess wherever you start it's working
2112
01:44:27.440 --> 01:44:29.390
out the relationships between that element
2113
01:44:29.390 --> 01:44:32.110
and the other elements so that things are in proportion.
2114
01:44:32.110 --> 01:44:35.340
And some of those techniques are things like looking
2115
01:44:35.340 --> 01:44:38.440
at the negative spaces or the shapes between features.
2116
01:44:38.440 --> 01:44:42.685
So with Mr. Parker King, one of the really nice
2117
01:44:42.685 --> 01:44:47.560
things about his profile and his face is this sort
2118
01:44:47.560 --> 01:44:50.480
of shape of his nose and the relationship
2119
01:44:50.480 --> 01:44:54.420
between where his nose comes in under the brow
2120
01:44:54.420 --> 01:44:58.283
and that sort of shape or space between his nose
2121
01:44:58.283 --> 01:44:59.780
and the eye.
2122
01:44:59.780 --> 01:45:02.460
And I'm just drawing onto this here so you can
2123
01:45:02.460 --> 01:45:03.470
see those shapes.
2124
01:45:03.470 --> 01:45:07.560
If you break this down into kind of shapes,
2125
01:45:07.560 --> 01:45:10.752
you've got all of these really nice facets
2126
01:45:10.752 --> 01:45:13.210
that you can work with.
2127
01:45:13.210 --> 01:45:17.250
And so it becomes almost
2128
01:45:17.250 --> 01:45:20.050
a kind of geometrical exercise.
2129
01:45:20.050 --> 01:45:21.770
And in fact, that was one of the things I think
2130
01:45:21.770 --> 01:45:23.630
was incredibly valuable about going
2131
01:45:23.630 --> 01:45:26.300
through that quite traditional sculpture training
2132
01:45:26.300 --> 01:45:30.170
when I did was spending weeks and weeks working
2133
01:45:30.170 --> 01:45:34.566
with a figure model and modelling in clay and having
2134
01:45:34.566 --> 01:45:37.370
an old school teacher come and go.
2135
01:45:37.370 --> 01:45:40.670
That plane, there's no, there's a plane
2136
01:45:40.670 --> 01:45:43.687
on the leg that joins to the thigh and this way,
2137
01:45:43.687 --> 01:45:45.240
and it comes around here and you can see
2138
01:45:45.240 --> 01:45:46.530
how the light's hitting it.
2139
01:45:46.530 --> 01:45:49.800
And until that, those elements were pointed out to me,
2140
01:45:49.800 --> 01:45:51.850
I physically couldn't see things.
2141
01:45:51.850 --> 01:45:53.870
And by the end of that sort of six weeks,
2142
01:45:53.870 --> 01:45:54.780
or however long it was,
2143
01:45:54.780 --> 01:45:57.680
of doing that exercise I could actually see things
2144
01:45:57.680 --> 01:45:58.770
I couldn't see before.
2145
01:45:58.770 --> 01:46:01.960
And I could understand the way planes shifted
2146
01:46:01.960 --> 01:46:04.270
and surfaces changed, and I could break things down
2147
01:46:04.270 --> 01:46:05.840
into shapes and forms.
2148
01:46:05.840 --> 01:46:09.934
And so those kinds of looking at an image or looking
2149
01:46:09.934 --> 01:46:12.170
at a life model and being able to say,
2150
01:46:12.170 --> 01:46:13.450
there's a shape here, a shape here,
2151
01:46:13.450 --> 01:46:16.440
a form there and breaking it down into the kind
2152
01:46:16.440 --> 01:46:19.940
of the geometry of the surfaces is the way that I tend
2153
01:46:19.940 --> 01:46:24.060
to work and trying to not name things and go
2154
01:46:24.060 --> 01:46:26.090
that's a nose, that's an eye, that's an ear,
2155
01:46:26.090 --> 01:46:29.860
but that's a shape that sits behind this shape.
2156
01:46:29.860 --> 01:46:33.470
And there's a series of convex curves or concave curves
2157
01:46:33.470 --> 01:46:36.400
or looking at the kind of geometry or the angle
2158
01:46:36.400 --> 01:46:38.340
of things is, and the relationships
2159
01:46:38.340 --> 01:46:40.820
between those elements and really seeing them in terms
2160
01:46:40.820 --> 01:46:45.820
of form and shape and trying to step outside
2161
01:46:45.929 --> 01:46:50.200
or away from the story of a face as a kind of like,
2162
01:46:50.200 --> 01:46:53.852
this is a, this person, or this is an eye,
2163
01:46:53.852 --> 01:46:57.390
that's how I kind of break things down in order to be
2164
01:46:57.390 --> 01:46:58.913
able to work with them.
2165
01:47:00.200 --> 01:47:02.130
I think I'm repeating myself a bit there but I hope
2166
01:47:02.130 --> 01:47:04.640
that makes sense.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
2167
01:47:04.640 --> 01:47:06.680
And you'll often find that I think if you've done any
2168
01:47:06.680 --> 01:47:09.540
life drawing or life modelling,
2169
01:47:09.540 --> 01:47:12.204
that teachers will talk about that, they'll sort of say,
2170
01:47:12.204 --> 01:47:13.860
look, you can see this,
2171
01:47:13.860 --> 01:47:17.746
there's this slanting kind of triangular plane
2172
01:47:17.746 --> 01:47:19.110
on the face here,
2173
01:47:19.110 --> 01:47:21.050
and then it recedes and it goes around the corner
2174
01:47:21.050 --> 01:47:23.120
over there and the light hits it in this direction.
2175
01:47:23.120 --> 01:47:25.770
So really paying attention to light and shadow
2176
01:47:25.770 --> 01:47:28.070
and shape and form and breaking things down
2177
01:47:28.070 --> 01:47:31.010
into those most basic elements and then building them
2178
01:47:31.010 --> 01:47:32.090
back up from there.
2179
01:47:32.090 --> 01:47:37.090
So sometimes, that, once you sort of solve problems
2180
01:47:38.370 --> 01:47:40.840
in particular details, like just honing in on lips
2181
01:47:40.840 --> 01:47:44.760
or honing in on a nose or honing in on eyes and looking
2182
01:47:44.760 --> 01:47:45.810
at the shapes and forms...
2183
01:47:45.810 --> 01:47:47.330
Then when it comes to putting the whole thing
2184
01:47:47.330 --> 01:47:49.700
together it's really thinking about all
2185
01:47:49.700 --> 01:47:51.652
the relationships between those elements
2186
01:47:51.652 --> 01:47:55.950
and working across them all fairly, evenly,
2187
01:47:55.950 --> 01:47:58.690
in a sense not focusing too much on one particular
2188
01:47:58.690 --> 01:48:01.620
area until you've got the whole blocked in.
2189
01:48:01.620 --> 01:48:04.130
And I tend to find with the compositional
2190
01:48:04.130 --> 01:48:06.030
or the proportional stuff,
2191
01:48:06.030 --> 01:48:09.962
that if I haven't been doing representation or drawing
2192
01:48:09.962 --> 01:48:12.790
or modelling for a while that that's the thing that takes
2193
01:48:12.790 --> 01:48:15.633
a lot of work is getting things in proportion.
2194
01:48:15.633 --> 01:48:18.040
And then the detail kind of sorts itself
2195
01:48:18.040 --> 01:48:20.040
out from there once the proportions are right.
2196
01:48:20.040 --> 01:48:22.980
If the proportions are wrong then everything
2197
01:48:22.980 --> 01:48:25.014
just doesn't fit together and you have to sort of get
2198
01:48:25.014 --> 01:48:28.130
rid of whole chunks and sort of start again
2199
01:48:28.130 --> 01:48:31.160
from scratch or redo it to get it in proportion
2200
01:48:31.160 --> 01:48:32.010
and get it right.
2201
01:48:34.210 --> 01:48:35.043
Great.
2202
01:48:36.630 --> 01:48:39.180
Oh, I can see some sunlight soap kind of on the edge
2203
01:48:39.180 --> 01:48:40.090
or a yellow...
2204
01:48:40.090 --> 01:48:42.880
Oh, that's looking fantastic.
2205
01:48:42.880 --> 01:48:45.770
You've got quite a good kind of deep
2206
01:48:49.030 --> 01:48:52.020
high relief almost coming in there.
2207
01:48:52.020 --> 01:48:54.813
Nice. (chuckles)
2208
01:49:08.680 --> 01:49:10.300
Oh, we've got bags of soap,
2209
01:49:10.300 --> 01:49:12.853
you can do about 100 portraits out of that lot.
2210
01:49:13.826 --> 01:49:16.042
(both laugh)
2211
01:49:16.042 --> 01:49:19.078
Oh, nice. It's such a good colour, isn't it?
2212
01:49:19.078 --> 01:49:21.955
Isn't it? It's almost like American cheese.
2213
01:49:21.955 --> 01:49:22.911
It is, yeah.
2214
01:49:22.911 --> 01:49:27.603
That's sort of very, egg-yolky kind of colour, yeah.
2215
01:49:35.148 --> 01:49:37.260
We sort of touched on this earlier,
2216
01:49:37.260 --> 01:49:39.950
Ellis, but is there a particular,
2217
01:49:39.950 --> 01:49:43.100
so profile is perhaps the easiest and then three
2218
01:49:43.100 --> 01:49:48.090
quarters and then face on, can you tell a proficiency of a,
2219
01:49:49.220 --> 01:49:53.080
you know, colonial artist or a cover by how much
2220
01:49:53.080 --> 01:49:55.000
they're showing off in terms of the position
2221
01:49:55.000 --> 01:49:57.343
of that particular carving?
2222
01:49:57.343 --> 01:49:59.480
I never really thought about it in those terms.
2223
01:49:59.480 --> 01:50:02.870
I guess from, with low relief, we,
2224
01:50:02.870 --> 01:50:05.318
you really rarely see a face on carving
2225
01:50:05.318 --> 01:50:08.930
because it's incredibly difficult to do that.
2226
01:50:08.930 --> 01:50:10.630
It really lends itself much more
2227
01:50:10.630 --> 01:50:13.198
to a three-dimensional approach.
2228
01:50:13.198 --> 01:50:18.198
And certainly off the top of my head
2229
01:50:18.830 --> 01:50:20.210
as I'm still thinking about it,
2230
01:50:20.210 --> 01:50:22.490
I'm not visualising any that I can think
2231
01:50:22.490 --> 01:50:26.270
of that are actually just straight face on, low reliefs,
2232
01:50:26.270 --> 01:50:27.380
although I'm sure there are.
2233
01:50:27.380 --> 01:50:30.880
And I would imagine that having a look at, you know,
2234
01:50:30.880 --> 01:50:34.490
Teresa Walker produced lots and lots of these tiny
2235
01:50:34.490 --> 01:50:36.550
little beautiful medallions and there quite a few
2236
01:50:36.550 --> 01:50:38.090
of them in collections around the country.
2237
01:50:38.090 --> 01:50:39.440
So it'd be interesting to see,
2238
01:50:39.440 --> 01:50:41.270
to have a look at what she produced and see
2239
01:50:41.270 --> 01:50:43.290
if there were many that had that kind
2240
01:50:43.290 --> 01:50:47.010
of face on presentation.
2241
01:50:47.010 --> 01:50:48.890
But I can't think of any off the top of my head.
2242
01:50:48.890 --> 01:50:52.440
I haven't been actively looking for them though. So yeah.
2243
01:50:52.440 --> 01:50:55.810
The Queen's always-
Yes. Yep.
2244
01:50:55.810 --> 01:50:56.943
She's always profile.
2245
01:50:58.120 --> 01:50:58.953
Yeah.
2246
01:50:58.953 --> 01:51:00.850
And I think coins are really the place where you see
2247
01:51:00.850 --> 01:51:02.730
most of these very low relief...
2248
01:51:02.730 --> 01:51:04.840
Shayne's showing us his work.
2249
01:51:04.840 --> 01:51:06.120
Oh, nice. Ah, excellent.
2250
01:51:06.120 --> 01:51:08.444
It's looking great, Shayne.
2251
01:51:08.444 --> 01:51:12.570
You've got that nice kind of plane between the eye
2252
01:51:12.570 --> 01:51:15.070
on the side of the nose coming down under the eye.
2253
01:51:22.746 --> 01:51:25.160
Is there anyone that you would recommend
2254
01:51:25.160 --> 01:51:27.200
investigating or following somebody
2255
01:51:27.200 --> 01:51:30.890
that might've influenced your own artistic practise, Ellis?
2256
01:51:30.890 --> 01:51:34.650
Oh, ah, Hmm.
2257
01:51:34.650 --> 01:51:36.643
That's a really interesting question.
2258
01:51:38.000 --> 01:51:39.323
I'm trying to think.
2259
01:51:40.560 --> 01:51:43.260
It'll be one of those ones where in half an hour's
2260
01:51:43.260 --> 01:51:46.003
time there'll be 10 people that I can think of,
2261
01:51:47.510 --> 01:51:49.290
but right off the top of my head I'm just having
2262
01:51:49.290 --> 01:51:51.860
a total blank at the moment.
2263
01:51:51.860 --> 01:51:53.470
I think what's kind of interesting
2264
01:51:53.470 --> 01:51:56.480
about the current moment is there's really not a lot
2265
01:51:56.480 --> 01:51:58.470
of artists that I know of that are doing a lot
2266
01:51:58.470 --> 01:52:01.583
of very figurative work.
2267
01:52:03.500 --> 01:52:06.310
I guess Janine Antoni, as a contemporary artist,
2268
01:52:06.310 --> 01:52:07.910
it's an American artist,
2269
01:52:07.910 --> 01:52:09.960
who's done a lot of work with portraiture
2270
01:52:09.960 --> 01:52:14.591
and figurative sculpture and also kind of critiquing
2271
01:52:14.591 --> 01:52:16.280
that or playing with that.
2272
01:52:16.280 --> 01:52:18.867
So she made some works a number of years ago
2273
01:52:18.867 --> 01:52:23.351
where she cast portraits of herself in chocolate and soap,
2274
01:52:23.351 --> 01:52:28.351
and then she gnawed away at the chocolate ones.
2275
01:52:28.550 --> 01:52:29.730
And then she washed,
2276
01:52:29.730 --> 01:52:31.380
used that washed away at the soap ones.
2277
01:52:31.380 --> 01:52:33.410
And the title of the work is "Lick and Lather."
2278
01:52:33.410 --> 01:52:36.490
So you end up seeing this sort of series of objects
2279
01:52:36.490 --> 01:52:39.330
that are in different states of kind of decay or sort
2280
01:52:39.330 --> 01:52:42.101
of have been consumed at the edges.
2281
01:52:42.101 --> 01:52:45.794
And she's done lots of variations or various kinds
2282
01:52:45.794 --> 01:52:48.990
of works that really interact with that idea
2283
01:52:48.990 --> 01:52:52.270
of portraiture and self portraiture, and probably,
2284
01:52:52.270 --> 01:52:53.850
internationally, most famous right now
2285
01:52:53.850 --> 01:52:56.900
is Mark Quinn because he has done that work
2286
01:52:56.900 --> 01:53:00.663
where he cast his own head in blood, which was,
2287
01:53:02.120 --> 01:53:04.750
has been shown in Australia in the past.
2288
01:53:04.750 --> 01:53:08.200
But also he made this beautiful work of one
2289
01:53:08.200 --> 01:53:10.100
of the Black Lives Matter activists.
2290
01:53:10.100 --> 01:53:12.290
And I can't remember her name now, which is terrible,
2291
01:53:12.290 --> 01:53:17.120
but the sculpture that was pulled down
2292
01:53:17.120 --> 01:53:19.623
in the UK that I can't remember the name of either.
2293
01:53:19.623 --> 01:53:21.923
It's all off the top of my head at the moment.
2294
01:53:22.880 --> 01:53:25.750
Was one of those ones that received international
2295
01:53:25.750 --> 01:53:28.840
news last year because a bunch of activists pull down
2296
01:53:28.840 --> 01:53:32.100
this bronze statue in the UK and chucked it in the river
2297
01:53:32.100 --> 01:53:34.240
of someone who'd been a slave trader,
2298
01:53:34.240 --> 01:53:39.240
and Mark Quinn made a bronze life sculpture
2299
01:53:39.570 --> 01:53:42.910
of one of the activists and put it on the pedestal
2300
01:53:42.910 --> 01:53:44.690
that the colonial sculpture had been
2301
01:53:44.690 --> 01:53:47.420
removed from, unauthorised.
2302
01:53:47.420 --> 01:53:49.360
I think it was up for about 24 hours and then
2303
01:53:49.360 --> 01:53:50.820
it got pulled down,
2304
01:53:50.820 --> 01:53:53.422
but I thought it was so fascinating that he chose
2305
01:53:53.422 --> 01:53:58.422
that really traditional high art medium of bronze
2306
01:53:58.460 --> 01:54:01.750
and made a contemporary work representing someone
2307
01:54:01.750 --> 01:54:04.677
who is involved in that struggle and sort of putting
2308
01:54:04.677 --> 01:54:09.677
them in the place of the historical figure who was,
2309
01:54:10.030 --> 01:54:12.540
you know, under criticism at the time.
2310
01:54:12.540 --> 01:54:15.560
So his work is pretty interesting as far
2311
01:54:15.560 --> 01:54:18.407
as someone who both works within those traditional
2312
01:54:18.407 --> 01:54:21.147
media and those representation systems,
2313
01:54:21.147 --> 01:54:23.360
but also critiques it and plays with it.
2314
01:54:23.360 --> 01:54:27.165
And he did this amazing sculpture of another artist
2315
01:54:27.165 --> 01:54:29.662
that was placed on that huge plinth,
2316
01:54:29.662 --> 01:54:31.310
I think it's Trafalgar square,
2317
01:54:31.310 --> 01:54:33.988
The Fourth Plinth or whatever it's called.
2318
01:54:33.988 --> 01:54:36.450
And again, totally can't remember the name
2319
01:54:36.450 --> 01:54:38.720
of the subject now, I should have, you know,
2320
01:54:38.720 --> 01:54:40.143
had a list of names with me.
2321
01:54:41.380 --> 01:54:44.987
He made this amazing marble sculpture of this woman
2322
01:54:44.987 --> 01:54:48.860
who is also an artist and she's someone who was born
2323
01:54:48.860 --> 01:54:50.680
with these birth defects.
2324
01:54:50.680 --> 01:54:52.505
It means that she doesn't have arms and legs.
2325
01:54:52.505 --> 01:54:57.130
And she's been quite an activist as someone who refuses
2326
01:54:57.130 --> 01:55:00.680
to use prosthetic limbs
2327
01:55:00.680 --> 01:55:03.040
and be uncomfortable in order
2328
01:55:03.040 --> 01:55:05.500
to be more acceptable to society.
2329
01:55:05.500 --> 01:55:09.150
So he made this incredibly beautiful marble sculpture
2330
01:55:09.150 --> 01:55:12.870
of her in her natural state.
2331
01:55:12.870 --> 01:55:16.920
So I think he's another one that's worth looking at.
2332
01:55:16.920 --> 01:55:19.450
But I'm just trying to think too, who is,
2333
01:55:19.450 --> 01:55:22.050
there's an indigenous artist in Australia who made
2334
01:55:22.050 --> 01:55:26.210
a bronze head in a balaclava
2335
01:55:26.210 --> 01:55:27.360
that was kind of making
2336
01:55:27.360 --> 01:55:29.520
a commentary on the whole Captain Cook sort
2337
01:55:29.520 --> 01:55:31.680
of controversy that's been happening recently.
2338
01:55:31.680 --> 01:55:33.750
And his name's gone out of my mind, too.
2339
01:55:33.750 --> 01:55:35.120
We're gonna add all of the links
2340
01:55:35.120 --> 01:55:39.580
into the Zoom chat and our Facebook comments.
2341
01:55:39.580 --> 01:55:40.775
So-
All of it.
2342
01:55:40.775 --> 01:55:42.610
Is Mark Quinn's subject
2343
01:55:42.610 --> 01:55:47.610
who is on the Trafalgar pedestal.
2344
01:55:47.720 --> 01:55:49.263
Excellent.
Alison Lapper.
2345
01:55:50.150 --> 01:55:50.983
Yeah.
2346
01:55:50.983 --> 01:55:51.816
I need my phone so I can sort of be
2347
01:55:51.816 --> 01:55:54.293
Googling along the side too.
2348
01:56:12.490 --> 01:56:14.853
I can see people still working away up there.
2349
01:56:28.690 --> 01:56:31.690
Jason Wing.
Oh, Jason Wing. Yes.
2350
01:56:31.690 --> 01:56:36.307
Did the Balaklava at the top of Captain Cook,
2351
01:56:39.160 --> 01:56:40.910
we can share that in our links too.
2352
01:56:43.563 --> 01:56:45.350
I think it's always really fascinating to see
2353
01:56:45.350 --> 01:56:47.960
that when contemporary artists are taking
2354
01:56:47.960 --> 01:56:51.447
traditional forms or processes or practises and using
2355
01:56:51.447 --> 01:56:53.820
them in a really interesting way
2356
01:56:55.610 --> 01:56:58.943
to critique some kind of contemporary issues or,
2357
01:57:01.060 --> 01:57:04.150
not necessarily valorizing those historical forms,
2358
01:57:04.150 --> 01:57:07.630
but making it a really effective use of them,
2359
01:57:07.630 --> 01:57:09.910
it's really fascinating to sort of to see
2360
01:57:09.910 --> 01:57:12.043
those different strategies and approaches.
2361
01:57:22.720 --> 01:57:27.170
I think a lot of artists working now are sort of,
2362
01:57:27.170 --> 01:57:31.100
that we have such an incredible wealth of availability
2363
01:57:31.100 --> 01:57:35.039
of opportunities and this kind of sense
2364
01:57:35.039 --> 01:57:38.410
that everyone's working in digital media or new media
2365
01:57:38.410 --> 01:57:41.590
or that you need to be working in ways that are
2366
01:57:41.590 --> 01:57:43.550
somehow very current.
2367
01:57:43.550 --> 01:57:46.954
And that sometimes revisiting really ancient
2368
01:57:46.954 --> 01:57:50.858
techniques and practises can still have
2369
01:57:50.858 --> 01:57:54.260
a really interesting resonance with what's going
2370
01:57:54.260 --> 01:57:56.336
on now and can be used in really interesting ways
2371
01:57:56.336 --> 01:58:01.336
to make commentary or challenge people's ways of thinking.
2372
01:58:02.330 --> 01:58:05.040
And particularly in relation to our history,
2373
01:58:05.040 --> 01:58:07.360
thinking about the sort of stories that have
2374
01:58:07.360 --> 01:58:09.209
or haven't been told and who's telling them,
2375
01:58:09.209 --> 01:58:10.910
who's being represented.
2376
01:58:10.910 --> 01:58:13.123
It's really good to question those things.
2377
01:58:15.740 --> 01:58:17.210
You know how we were speaking before
2378
01:58:17.210 --> 01:58:20.460
about this being so meditative and losing track of time.
2379
01:58:20.460 --> 01:58:22.110
So we're almost out of time.
2380
01:58:22.110 --> 01:58:24.660
I just completely lost track of time.
2381
01:58:24.660 --> 01:58:27.050
We are actually just about out of time.
2382
01:58:27.050 --> 01:58:29.940
So perhaps we could get people if they were interested
2383
01:58:29.940 --> 01:58:32.180
to turn their cameras on and show us
2384
01:58:32.180 --> 01:58:33.492
what they've been working on.
2385
01:58:33.492 --> 01:58:35.659
That would be fantastic.
2386
01:58:47.068 --> 01:58:47.930
Here we go.
2387
01:58:47.930 --> 01:58:49.226
Look at those sculptures coming together.
2388
01:58:49.226 --> 01:58:50.393
Wonderful work.
2389
01:58:52.833 --> 01:58:55.370
Fantastic. Thank you so much, everybody.
2390
01:58:55.370 --> 01:58:57.533
This is tremendous.
Ah, that's great.
2391
01:59:02.207 --> 01:59:04.558
I wanna get some of that yellowy orangy soap.
2392
01:59:04.558 --> 01:59:08.380
I think that yellowy orange was Wright's?
2393
01:59:08.380 --> 01:59:11.430
Yeah, Wright's soap. Beautiful.
2394
01:59:11.430 --> 01:59:12.763
We'll check it out.
2395
01:59:14.460 --> 01:59:16.360
Good work by everybody.
Oh, nice.
2396
01:59:17.410 --> 01:59:19.040
Yep. They're terrific. Aren't they?
2397
01:59:19.040 --> 01:59:21.083
Those backlit and that's fantastic.
2398
01:59:23.060 --> 01:59:25.250
Wonderful. Thank you so much, everybody-
2399
01:59:25.250 --> 01:59:27.540
Thanks, everyone.
Joining us today.
2400
01:59:27.540 --> 01:59:29.670
I think that's probably all we have time for,
2401
01:59:29.670 --> 01:59:32.330
but thank you so much, Ellis.
2402
01:59:32.330 --> 01:59:33.861
Oh, you're most welcome.
2403
01:59:33.861 --> 01:59:36.010
That was absolutely tremendous.
2404
01:59:36.010 --> 01:59:38.070
And it was so lovely to listen to your commentary
2405
01:59:38.070 --> 01:59:40.007
as we were, everybody was busily carving
2406
01:59:40.007 --> 01:59:42.480
and we've had lots of comments about people who would
2407
01:59:42.480 --> 01:59:46.240
love to go back and rewatch the recording
2408
01:59:46.240 --> 01:59:47.500
because they've learnt so much.
2409
01:59:47.500 --> 01:59:50.630
So the recording of this session will be
2410
01:59:50.630 --> 01:59:53.190
on our website, portrait.gov.au.
2411
01:59:53.190 --> 01:59:55.880
So we always encourage you guys to jump on our website
2412
01:59:55.880 --> 01:59:57.930
and check out all of the recordings we have there,
2413
01:59:57.930 --> 01:59:59.830
under the watch section on our website
2414
01:59:59.830 --> 02:00:02.400
is where you'll find all those on demand videos.
2415
02:00:02.400 --> 02:00:03.660
It's also up on Facebook.
2416
02:00:03.660 --> 02:00:06.765
So please let people know, share with your friends,
2417
02:00:06.765 --> 02:00:08.810
get the message out about our workshops,
2418
02:00:08.810 --> 02:00:11.190
because we really really love the fact
2419
02:00:11.190 --> 02:00:12.970
that Australians are supporting creativity,
2420
02:00:12.970 --> 02:00:14.800
particularly after the year we've had last year.
2421
02:00:14.800 --> 02:00:16.900
So, and thank you so much for teaching us.
2422
02:00:16.900 --> 02:00:18.220
It's an absolute pleasure. I had a ball...
2423
02:00:18.220 --> 02:00:20.020
I'm really, you know,
2424
02:00:20.020 --> 02:00:22.300
and I loved attending the one that I attended as well.
2425
02:00:22.300 --> 02:00:24.550
So I'll be back to attend more in the future.
2426
02:00:24.550 --> 02:00:26.220
Thank you so much. Terrific.
2427
02:00:26.220 --> 02:00:28.560
Thank you, everybody. And yeah, jump on our website.
2428
02:00:28.560 --> 02:00:29.640
Follow us on social.
2429
02:00:29.640 --> 02:00:31.460
Get all the information about our next workshop
2430
02:00:31.460 --> 02:00:32.550
that we've got coming up.
2431
02:00:32.550 --> 02:00:35.000
And until that time, we'll see you later.
2432
02:00:35.000 --> 02:00:35.953
Bye-bye, thank you.