Pulp Sculpture with Elena Ailes
SCULPTURE SCULP 695 001 | 1.5 credits | $125 lab fee | August 3–9
This course will introduce students to the joys of working with pulp—an amorphous, absorbent, and raw material that is often easily sourced, affordable (free!), versatile, and sustainable. Students will make functional and sculptural objects using recycled and found materials, primarily paper (cotton) and wood (cellulose) pulp, with a few brief jaunts into the wild world of paper clay and paper-mache. This course will focus mainly on press molds, dipped molds, and the coating of structural armatures, but experimentation and exploration of novel ways of approaching materials is always encouraged. The course will draw inspiration from contemporary artists whose practices touch on similar themes of sustainability, resourcefulness, playfulness, and material joy, including Wangechi Mutu, Andrea Zittel, Oren Pinhassi, and Roxanne Swentzell. We will also look to long-established craft traditions, from adobe brick or wattle-and-daub building to the long history of masks and effigies. Assignments will invite students to make place settings with found objects and explore color, texture, and scale through a hybrid object that incorporates all three demonstrated methods (press molds, dip molds on removable wire armatures, and coating with pulp). The course will culminate in an open studio presentation of installed sculptures.
Elena Ailes, tilted maw, 2021, hydrocal plaster, cedar, 10” x 5” x 6”
Elena Ailes (b. Albuquerque, NM) is concerned with the encounters, intimacies and discordances found between human (actions, bodies, histories) and nonhuman (thing, being, astral) worlds.
She has presented her texts, videos, and installations widely, including at Apparatus Projects (Chicago), the SculptureCenter (NYC), Randy Alexander Gallery (Chicago), Sector2337 (Chicago), the Harvard Graduate School of Design (Cambridge), and 4th Ward Project Space (Chicago.) She received her MFA in Sculpture from School of the Art Institute.
She is interested in that which makes her a better person and a worse person, especially in theory. In reality, she is an artist and writer living and working in Chicago, and currently teaches at SAIC.