I had a bit of a revelation about my work after setting It out in a crit situation and getting opinions from other people. When Rory gave my his opinion, I shut it out, and disagreed with him, because that is what was easy at the time. He wanted to me explain why I was trying to make my work look like stones or pebbles, and I was convinced that I needed them to look like pebbles for my work to be successful, and for me to have enough excitement about it to carry on. Rory disagreed. He gave me the example of Toby Christians piece "Snowball"

Christian has made a marble sculpture that looks so much like a snowball it quite disconcerting to look at. Until you realise it is made from marble and not frozen water, it looks like magic, or trickery. It is an excellent piece of trompe loiel, and I couldn't understand how it related to my work. Rory said if I really wanted to make the pieces look like stones, I should remove the footprint element and work at making them as convincing as stones as possible. I thought he was talking rubbish and said that if I wanted to display stones, I would go to the beach and get some stones, and that the only reason Christian had worked hard to make a real looking snowball is because you simply can't display an actual snowball outside in normal conditions. However, after seeing my work laid out in the crit, I suddenly understood what he meant, and felt quite guilty about being so argumentative.

The pieces were laid out in their proposed positions, but made from plaster as at that point I hadn't cast them in concrete. I found they were suddenly representing pebbles on their own. The small cracks and bubbles were reminiscent of the sea, and the powdery quality of the sand represented the sand perfectly. They work much better as symbols for stones, rather than blindingly obvious copies. This again related to Plato's perfect horse theory. Its like the "idea" stone, or the "perfect" stone is the image everyone has in their head, then there's an actual stone, which is a representation of the "perfect" stone, and below that is my piece, which is a representation of the already represented idea stone. Ronald. H. Nash explains it better in his book 'Lifes Ultimate Questions':
It’s great to see the ideas switching around between theory and practice. The wonderful thing about art is that the ideas are ‘materialised’ and ‘contained’ within the object. This simultaneity of narrative or compaction of various levels of meaning is where it gets exciting. You are right to question yourself as to how you respond to other’s comments, sometimes the penny drops much later and you see that there has always been a certain un-noticed element riding in the background somewhere. Early Greek thought explained all existence in terms of primary matter, this is contrasted with the theories of Heraclitus, that all existence may be summed up as perpetual change. In your case perhaps the idea of the erratic. The interesting issue is of course that as human beings we come back to the same issues over and over again, but each time we find a new way of engaging with them.
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