Living Art: Printing text with a sphere
First test print with the sphere. Click for a larger version.
The assignment this week in Living Art was to "make random." I made this:
Essentially, it's a ball that has words glued to the outside of it. When you ink it up and roll it across paper, it creates a composition: fragments of words, spread across the page in a way that is responsive to the gestures of the artist, but retains some amount of unpredictability.
The printing sphere is made out of a 4 lb Everlast medicine ball, glued to which are 20 or so words, hand-carved in Speedball "Speedy Carve" medium. The typeface is News Gothic (bolded variant).
Andy Miller took some excellent photos of my presentation of the Sphere in Living Art.
Rationale and more images after the jump.
I've been using Living Art as an opportunity to push the boundaries of my comfort zone. I do a lot of work with language, but it's almost always screen based; in this case, I wanted to do something that addressed the physicality of words, and experiment a little bit with page layout. I wanted to do something visual and concrete, two things that I've never really done before. I'm happy with the results, even if they aren't exactly what I was expecting.
Here's another print, which I made this morning when presenting the project in class:
Another print with the sphere. Click for a larger version.
Here's what my work area looked like while I was carving the words:
Future plans for the printing sphere: I'm going to add some more words and re-glue some of the existing words, and then experiment with different colors of ink and paper. The current prints are on 18"x24" sheets; I'd like to experiment with larger sizes, and maybe compositions with more than one person handling the sphere.