Mixed Media Sculpture

Mixed media sculpture is fundamentally most sculpture, as it is defined as any sculpture than is comprised of more than one material, plinths and stands aside. By using more than one material when making a piece of sculpture you are giving yourself more options for structural integrity, colour, texture, mass, scale, etc. Mixed media art is more specific in its delivery, a mixed media piece is produced using several materials to express something through its visual language, more commonly acknowledged within paintings, a mixed media piece of art possesses a sense of unified chaos or regimental order depending on the artist’s creative angle.

In sculpture metal is a common material that an artist chooses as a base material and then adds additional materials to create features or elements of colour, pattern or shape. Jenny Pickford’s ‘Forget me not’. By adding the blue glass flowers to the galvanised steel leaves she has changed the character of the work and altered its impact.

‘Balloon Press’ by Wilfred Pritchard is a mixed media piece that uses a found French antique press with a bronze balloon. The work concentrates on the fine line between humour and trickery. To the untrained eye the work is convincing, it expresses its narrative and works with the wooden press to demonstrate a functional object but the solid mass that is the balloon is a tromp l’oeil that plays with the audience by hinting at authenticity. Tromp l’oeil is a clever way to work with mixed media; it offers a method of creating objects that possess many different qualities themselves in the convincing manner that the work would need to be a successful tromp l’oeil. Often only used in painting for the common expression of the boundary between two dimensional and three dimensional, whilst not as common in sculpture tromp l’oeil is a wonderful way to express a sense of humour with the work. The most convincing tromp l’oeil sculptures are those that blur the line between a functional object and an unpractical one; often seen in the creation of faux clothing where the artist has produced an item of clothing from a contrasting material like wood or stone.