My project had many ups and downs. I decided to tackle sculpture first as I knew I would have the most issues with it. It’s like a dinner plate. A legendary technique is to eat the least delicious food first and save your favourite for last. A few years ago, I was obsessed with creating sculptures. Unfortunately, every single one I created was an animal like creature. I wanted to push myself to create a human like sculpture. Believe me, it did not turn out how it imagined.

I created Vic. A legless and armless human like robot. He was put together with a glue gun, polymer clay, wires, cheap hair extensions, fabric, and paint. He is made up of a head, torso, and lower abdomen. The rest of him is put together with wires. He is wearing a black transparent dress so the viewer can see how much his body is missing. He has black unkempt hair, exaggerated make-up, and an uncomfortable facial expression. He sits on a chair made of recycled material with eyes pasted repeatedly behind him. I wanted to create a sculpture that anyone could look at and interpret it in their own way. Maybe someone looks at the eyes and sees it as feeling watched in crowds. Someone could look at the lack of legs and arms and see it as feeling powerless. The list can go on. It started with my own personal interpretation, and I hope that others will have their own.

Tim Burton is a huge inspiration for my sculpture. The characters he designs are so creepy, and I love it. I find his male characters are often designed bug eyed with large heads and torsos with frail, skinny legs, arms, and hips. I am a big fan of this style, it puts the character just slightly off. I wanted to find ways to put my own sculpture in the position that he’s human like, yet off. His head is just a little too big for his body and I painted with metallic gold over one of his eyes. Yet, I added a gloss to his face to create a human like ‘shine’. I added this gloss to his eyes, nose, lips, and forehead. This made his face reflect light in a similar way that a human’s face would, making him seem more alive. I also made him slouch, putting him in a position that most humans sit. This position helped the theme of my project, I wanted Vic to seem powerless.

The actual intention behind my piece is very personal to me. But, I have a new idea behind the piece. It was cool as I developed a vague story for my character, Vic. This idea was formed while putting him together and designing him. Vic was a robot designed to be a bellhop in a fancy shmancy hotel. Robots were designed to work with humanity without any human like needs. The programmer and designer of Vic experimented with a drive that gave him emotions and a personality. Vic loved his job, he was very friendly and worked hard. Vic considered himself a real human, he had a kind ‘soul’ and never acting negatively towards any guest. Unfortunately, the owner of Vic found out about the human like drive and became paranoid as their have been countless stories of robots designed similarly becoming violent. The hotel owner arranged for Vic’s arms and legs to be removed, then sent to the junkyard. Another discarded robot found him in the yard, and gave him wires as legs. His face was mostly destroyed, so the junkyard robot tried to paint over it. The sculpture shows Vic just retrieving the legs and face paint. At this point, he moves by using his leg wires to drag himself while lying on his back, resulting in a beat up back. He is dedicated to slowly building himself up into a stronger form by replacing his missing parts with new ones. Vic does this by meeting people who are willing to help him. Unfortunately, at the back of his mind he is obsessed with the idea of destroying the man who owns the hotel.

  In the end, I had a lot of fun with this project. I was actually unhappy with the end result, but I feel I’ve learned a lot. I know how to use sculpting tools a little better and I feel I understand balancing as well. I was really happy with getting the sculpture to balance on thin chair legs. I’m glad that the sculpture wasn’t too busy, I wanted to keep adding but I told myself to leave it. I was also happy that the whole thing looks a bit like kids project, garbage. Something to be thrown out eventually. This wasn’t purposeful, but Vic himself was thrown out. I hope to build up my skill of putting together sculptures in the future.