3D – Julaine Makes Art

3D Insitu/Land Art:
A History of Finding Ones Self

This was the first project we did in 3D in the fall. I didn’t write an artist statement, but I wrote about the process:

This piece was inspired by a photo by Charles Ross called Star Axis, which I found in a Land Art book.

“Star Axis is an architectonic earth/star sculpture constructed with the geometry of the stars. Created by artist Charles Ross, all of Star Axis’s shapes and angles are determined by earth-to-star alignments. They are built into the sculpture so that we can experience them in human scale. Star Axis offers an intimate experience of how the earth’s environment extends into the space of the stars.” https://www.staraxis.org/

I spent some time lying on the beach along the river looking at the stars late at night, pondering, and realizing that people have been doing this exact thing, to understand their place in the world and to find their way. Polaris is the one star that stays fairly static in the sky, and has been used as a navigation tool. It is found at the tip of the handle little dipper.
I tried to figured out what orientation the little dipper appears for us here in Dawson, and replicate that orientation of the constellation in this piece, but it was very unscientific, and more symbolic.

The Process
-Laid in sand, feeling the earth, embodying that person seeking orientation, navigation, meaning, and grounding myself.
-Friend traced my body in the sand.
-Lit sage, took a moment to speak to creator, thank for this medicine, cleared my own energy, the energy of the space, and the tools and gems I was using. I drank some tea and sat with creator and felt grateful for this ritual and the sun and this practice.
-Empty excess/burned sage into the river.
-Used a tin camping cup to carve out my human shape into the sand and clay. Tossing excess into the river.
-Mapped out seven chakras within the imprint of the body.
-Carved with a stick the circles around the imprint that met with the corresponding chakras
-While I carved, I was sweeping the excess sand away, which made a really nice circular pattern, and somatically felt like brushing away of stagnant energy that didn’t serve this practice.
-Collected sticks, drift wood, sun bleach, broke pieces and places them into circular chakra celestial grooves. Excess sticks were tossed to the side.
-Picked out gemstones that corresponded with the colours of the 7 chakras.
-Inner chakras (inner constellation)
black obsidian (root chakra), peach calcite (sacral), citrine (solar plexus chakra), rose quartz (heart chakra), sodalite (throat chakra), elestial amethyst (third eye chakra), pink aragonite (crown chakra).
This piece explores the relationship between inner and the outer cosmos.

Soft Sculpture
I(c)litorite

The making of this piece took MANY hours of hand stitching. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but my classmate and friend, Johanna, taught me how to do some very basic sewing.

I went on a deep dive into the clitoris for this project. The clitoris was finally discovered to be more then just a “pea”in 1998 by Australian urologist Helen O’Connell and her team. The first 3-D sonography revealing the true size of a stimulated clitoris wasn’t until 2009! That blew my mind. The more I read, the more I wanted to read. I was fuming. Clits were barely mentioned in medical texts prior to all this. Medically this was an issue, these areas would be damaged in surgery due to not having enough research done on them.
Additionally… PLEASURE… THE ORGASM GAP! Google it..
This is where I started to read about New York artist and activist, Sophia Wallace and her CLITORACY work. The work has to do with destigmatizing talking about the clitoris, sex education, and spreading awareness about pleasure, and about the millions of people with vaginas around the world who have their genitals mutilated.
There is so much more to discuss on this topic…maybe I’ll dive in again someday. This was one of my first projects at SOVA.. Beauty.

The Making of Recompose
Miniature Working With Assemblage

The idea for this project was to make a miniature model that would be used for a fake proposition of a public art sculpture. I ended up getting lost in my own idea. I wood glued several pieces of plywood together, cut a rough shape with a band saw, smoothed it out with a sander, and worked for MANY hours carving out the face with a dremmel. We were asked to green screen the piece and photo shop it into the space we envisioned it in.