I’m
deep into 3D art, but the past two weeks had me in despair. Our assignment was to produce a volumetric
line sculpture, representative of an everyday object, using wire. Taking my beloved Bodum French press as my
model, I bent, stabbed, cut, twisted, joined and ripped out bits of aluminum
and black-coated steel wire, giving up whole beautiful mornings and afternoons
to the ordeal and leaving a trail of blood on my kitchen table. Really, the
project seemed hopeless when I simply couldn’t get the thing to even stand upright. But I was determined to do my best, and the earworm
of my art teacher’s voice urged me on: “Keep going!” she is fond of saying.
So,
I kept going. I twirled the dark wire
into a knob, fashioned a lid out of deep aluminum loops, and made curlicues for
the sieve with thin steel wire.
Suddenly, the structure was actually starting to look pretty cute, and
thus bolstered, I moved on to create a fanciful sinusoidal wave to reinforce
the emulated stainless bands and attached to those the dark wire handle. A metamorphosis! Finally, I had something that matched what I
had in my mind’s eye and that I was proud of.
It
was an exercise not just in creativity but also in tenacity, and a true
transformation, not just of the object, but also of my confidence. A small thing, perhaps, but an important reminder
of the power of determination. Today during
critique, my teacher said, “You became friends with the wire”. Well, that’s one way to put it.
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