Katarina Burin
Gen Ed 1191 | Last offered Fall 2024
How do we know ourselves through things and what does it mean to think with our hands, to innovate and to productively fail as a tool of self knowledge?
How do we know ourselves through things?
This course fosters a hands-on, studio-art-based approach to thinking about our lives with objects—the things we make, the things we buy, the things we break.
You will develop technical skills and material curiosities in sculpture as we explore different ways of making and working with objects in a studio art classroom. Reflecting on the conceptual and ontological implications of “”stuff”” in a world of new materials and material obsolescence, we will engage innovation along with failure as motors for experimental practice and self-knowledge.
The course touches on a variety of foundational skills in three-dimensional art and design. It provides time and guidance to build a deeper hands-on understanding of materials and construction, using found materials, paper, cardboard, wood, plaster, clay and a variety of other mold-making, casting and sculpting materials. Work will grow and disintegrate. We will build and take apart.
We will reflect on the implications of programmed obsolescence present in everyday life and how breakage, recycling and adaptive reuse may be counterpoints to expectations of infinite growth and we will crack open objects to think about technology and manufacturing processes. We’ll explore our potential as makers and our agency as consumers.
Finally, from the vantage of artists, this course asks you to challenge presumptions concerning success and failure. Expectations, flipped on their heads, can become the basis for rich and thorough artistic pursuit. We learn to embrace the experience of making with curiosity, uncertain of our trajectory, and discover surprises, strange, awkward and compelling.