Brooke Randle
A Drop of Oil
Prompt: The assignment was to use wire and a repurposed object as materials to create a sculpture. The focus was to recreate an object or familiar shape with a wire as a contour. The recycled material had to be incorporated in some way.
I started by constructing the fingers, using small circles of 16 gauge annealed wire and a bare outline of a more flexible aluminum wire, I connected the shapes together with a 30 gauge wire to create a 3-dimensional contour. The palm was constructed with larger and more organic shapes, I connected each finger to the base of the hand and with each added section the piece grew more stable. I secured the hand on a piece of scrap wood with some small wire anchors.
My original idea was to have pieces of plastic falling from the pinched fingers as the focal point. working with a demolished vegetable oil bottle I attempted this, but it didn’t turn out how I imagined so with help from my professor I decided to change the concept and have the hand pinch a flower constructed with the same plastic. The hot-glued-together petals were held up with an annealed wire stem wrapped in the 30 gauge wire to make it more distinct against the dark hand. Glued to the wood base the flower grew through the 6 inch tall hand staggering above the fingers with its extra 3 inches, making the whole structure a little less then a foot tall with the added height of the base. Finally, I stapled the expiration date of the vegetable oil bottle on the wood and spray painted the pedals yellow in a haphazard fashion to have some color splatter on the hand itself.
I see the expiration date as a representation of the limited time the world has due to our steps furthering pollution and climate change. The flower made out of a material that causes so much harm being held by the hand sheds a hopeful light on humanity’s efforts to heed the warning.
