The Balance(s)

This piece, as the title reflects, is about the idea of balance. With this piece, I felt that I was able to represent the concept of balance as presented in life; the different materials each have a different weight that contributed to having certain parts of the sculpture being much heavier than others. The right side of the sculpture turned out to be much heavier than the other side, being composed of plaster, aluminum, various wooden pieces, and clay, and a piece of wood, one plaster covered piece, and a ball of plastic covered in wood shavings, respectively. However, the piece is still able to balance. This is a representation of how in life we sometimes have to balance extremely heavy things but we can always make it work in one way or another. Another aspect of this sculpture comes in with the way that the materials are distributed, with the plaster pieces and wood being distributed throughout rather than being concentrated in one place, which is meant to be representative of how creating a balance in our lives often consists of being able to distribute components of our life. Finally, the reason that it’s called “The Balance(s)” as opposed to “The Balance” is because I wanted to capture the way that there isn’t just one way that you can create balance, which was actually something that occurred not only in the process of making the sculpture, but also with the final piece; while making it, the model that I chose to design it after (my third mockup) actually came apart, but that let me reorient the piece and find a new way to structure it. As for that being shown in the final piece, that is because of the way that it can be oriented in different ways and still remain standing.

Mockups: