So I have decided to begin a blog. The explanation is simple: do anything rather than start the research for and a draft of my paper for the diploma exam in June 2026. A title and index is due on 30 November.

I began the practical work on my diploma project in sculpture last summer, starting with a series of full body self portraits, in water colour and coloured pencil on paper, 80 cm by 120 cm, some of them you can find here on the website. There are nine in total. I began the series in order to get a better sense of the shape and proportions of a body -- and my body was the most easily accessible body to me. This one here, me sitting and smoking, was the third and the first one I was satisfied with, the first two feel hesitant, lacking a certain confidence or boldness. 

I followed up these drawings with small -- 25cm to 30cm height -- clay models. I made several from October to December 2024, enjoying the three-dimensional work very much, once again using myself as a model. It was not really a conscious choice to use myself as a model but simply the easiest choice at the time. But had I had the money to pay for a model I would have preferred that initially. This has changed since and the practical considerations have been overtaken by a strong feeling of rightness about using my own body. 

The small clay figures led to a half-scale sculpture, a sitting figure which you can find under "Sculptural Work" here on the website. I measured my body: limbs, torso, neck, head, hands, feet and divided the resulting measurements by two and used these numbers as a basis for the armature and shape of the figure. Is it a self-portrait? Yes and no. To my mind, the figure occupies a liminal (1) space: drifting between a self-portrait and a more general, even generic, representation of a female form. I covered it with sentences cut from pages of Simone de Beauvoir`s The Second Sex (French: Le Deuxième Sexe, 1949), the words clothing, covering and obscuring the female shape, shifting it towards representation as opposed to simply "being".

Using myself as body model, measuring and comparing it to the three-dimensional shape I created forced me to confront my own physicality, my proprioceptive senses, which are, I quote: "(...) generated as a result of our own actions. They include the senses of position and movement of our limbs and trunk, the sense of effort, the sense of force, and the sense of heaviness."(1)

This morning I continued to work on the armature and inner layers of the life size sculpture, work which i had begun in early October. Today I realised that despite measuring myself the shoulders, upper arms, back, lower back and buttocks were not only too wide but also too bulky overall. Also the angle of the upper thighs where they emerge from the torso was too shallow. To get a better sense of the true proportions I climbed on the plinth, seating myself on the proverbial pedestal. Immediately i felt how this influences the posture: the balancing required to stay up directly affects the position of the limbs and placement of the buttocks on the plinth. More about the practical and technical tomorrow. 

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(1) Definitions from Oxford Language: liminal (/ˈlɪmɪnl/), adjective: technical, adjective: liminal. 1. occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold. ( "I was in the liminal space between past and present").  2. relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process. ( "that liminal period when a child is old enough to begin following basic rules but is still too young to do so consistently")

(2) Proske U, Gandevia SC. The Proprioceptive Senses: Their Roles in Signaling Body Shape, Body Position and Movement, and Muscle Force. Physiol Rev 92: 1651–1697, 2012; doi:10.1152/physrev.00048.2011. (first visited 07/11/2025)