Concentration

 

     Ever since I was a little kid I loved to listen to fairytales about amazing creatures and great sacrifices. After hearing one I’d try to find as many different versions as I could. A common factor I found was that the character always had to sacrifice a part of him/her in order to live happily. In my concentration I have tried to make these characters and their sacrifices literally come out of books by using clay and other materials to bring them to life.

 

At first, when these stories are read they seem sad or disturbing but in the end the characters find peace. In “Red Shoes”, the character gets her feet cut off. To most people that would be awful but the figure is smiling because she no longer has to dance but can rest in a chair. In “little match girl”, the child dies in the end but when she dies the match is burning and she is no longer cold. In these stories the sacrifices these characters made are insignificant compared to the peace they found. Some of the hardest things to give up are the things we can’t see. Like in “east of the sun and west of the moon”, the girl has to leave behind her family and all that she knows in order to go on an adventure and help save her family from poverty. In the end she falls in love with the man that was once a bear and of course lived happily ever after. Also in “beauty and the beast”, the prince gave up his humanity so he did not have to marry someone he did not love and in the end he found true love and it set him free. Most of my pieces are done in clay and are depicted with books that have been altered to use figure/ground principle. They now depict an important moment in the story to help connect it together. My pieces also play with the proportion of objects so as to exaggerate main points of the story.