Date: September 26,2012. Title:Pattern Materials: Clay, wire, and cardboard. Size: ( 26.3, 19.7, 15 ).

For the Great Pretender course, my art class, we were assigned to make a sculpture relating to the pattern of movement of our power animal. The purpose of this project was to help epitomize and apprehend our power animal’s  movement. I am very content with how my sculpture wound up and its manifestation. I learned that our power animal can imply who we are as a human being.
PATTERNS

This piece is titled Patterns because it describes my power animal’s movement. I believe that our power animals are hidden in our special abilities and physical features.I was influenced to choose a bird as my power animal by everything I saw, felt, and experienced in my life.  when I think of a bird I think of freedom. To me birds are symbols of freedom and I felt free when I was making this sculpture.

We took many steps to get to this final product. We explored the meaning of  power animal and we used the I-CHING to learn about elements as a way of finding our power animals. We explored our power animals in depth and observed their movements at the zoo. Each path on the sculpture represents a different pattern of movement. In our sculptures we had to incorporate our power animal’s movement, human activity that is similar to our power animal’s movement, and a machine that has the same pattern of movement as our power animal. My choice of color for my animal’s natural elements was based on the color they are in the real world. For example water is blue so I used blue to represent water. I wanted to create proportion between the elements. Since water covers 75% of the earth, I tried to represent that in my sculpture.

We sketched the power animal to understand its general shape and created a flip book to understand its movement. We sketched the movement in a linear path to have an idea of our power animals’ pattern of movement, then transferred those patterns to the wires. We made the feet, out of clay to make the wires stand. Later, we decorated our cardboard with a representation of our natural element or elements. Then, I made the trees and fish to making it more complex. This was a very cool project because I got to know more about myself and who I really am. Also, I learned about how simple things can have a big impact on the world.