This was a day of revelations for me. Firstly seeing how people could do the equivalent of quick life drawings as an excercise… (described here).
Then lead tutor Darren Woodhead had bought clay for us to make some kind of 3D representation of what we were seeing. We convened at the top of the cliffs in the afternoon and people settled to pushing the air drying clay around and engage with the subject matter in a different way.

razorbill – st abbs – field monotype – c. A3

I had an idea how I wanted to approach it… to combine drawing with the 3D making…I’d been monoprinting razorbills so carried on with them (I’ve really struggled with the pattern vs form of razorbills in the past) at first it was muddly moulding and everything rounded off with forms briefly found then lost.

razorbill sculpture drawings – graphite – 76 x 55 cms

I decided to start to construct building blocks…. first something like the base of a kayak… the flattened curving belly of the razorbill with sharp pointed bristle tail. as in top left of drawing.  Each time I made new components I tried to draw them and their was something new in manufacturing forms in real space and then translating them into 2D.  Changing the way of drawing and the way the sheet got filled.

clay razorbill

The lump of clay on the window sill back home doesn’t seem a big deal but I know it has changed something in the brain.

razorbill – graphite

Even the drawings from the ‘sculpture’ have a quality of their own.