- Hello, everybody. Welcome to an afternoon of creativity here at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. So lovely to see you all coming in today, and so grateful that you could join us for this fun session this afternoon. We've brought you so many artist workshops over the last few months, over the last year, in fact. We've had life drawing, we've had a watercolour portraiture, we've had charcoal drawing, but today we're going into the realm of 3D and we're actually gonna start exploring sculpture. So, about a year ago, our fantastic artist, Ellis Hutch I'll introduce you to her in a little while... She was stuck in lockdown and having to try and work out how to teach her visual art students, her sculpture students, how to sculpt, how to carve, they're in a group house, they have no tools with them, what to do? And so from that quandary, this particular programme that we're gonna bring to you today was born. So, before we get underway I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which I'm broadcasting from today, the Ngambri and the Ngunawal peoples, and I'd like to extend my respect to their elders past, present and emerging. I'd also like to extend that same respect to any of the traditional custodians on the lands from which you come to us from today. I'm hoping that a few of you may have attended our workshops before, but for those of you who haven't, we like to make them highly interactive. And what do we mean by this? We actually love to see your faces. So if you could please leave your cameras on throughout this session, as we go around the room I'll show you this fantastic, gigantic screen, that Ellis will be able to see you working away on, and we'll be able to share our creations throughout the programme with her. It's always such a fantastic thing to see people being creative and being together in a community being creative. That said, we would like you to keep your microphones muted, just so that everybody can hear the session today, and we don't have anyone accidentally hijacking our microphones. Now, if you'd like to communicate with Ellis or myself throughout the programme, you can do so using the chat function on Zoom or using the comments section, if you're coming to us on Facebook Live. It looks like for all intents and purposes that I'm in an empty theatre, but there's a cast of thousands behind the scenes here. And I'd just like to introduce you on our way round to meeting Ellis today. First of all, we have the lovely Steph who is our Facebook Live expert. She's gonna be the person who's gonna be manning any of the comments there today. Coming further around, we have Matt. Matt is your Zoom friend. Some of you may recognise Matt from all of our virtual programmes. I can see Anita waving at Matt. He is a regular face here at the portrait gallery and he'll be communicating with you on Zoom today. So please pass your questions through to Matt and he'll pass them on to us. Production desk. The wizard, Hector, is hanging out over here. If any of the camera angles are not to your liking, he's the person to blame. So please, shout out at Hector if you'd like to have any other camera views and we'll do our very best to accommodate. Now, as behind the camera... Rob, do you wanna come out and take a bow? Here's Rob, he's gonna be manning our camera for us. You may also recognise Rob from all of our virtual programmes. And here you all are joining us today from around Australia and the world. Oh, it's not very easy to see on our big screen but we can see you perfectly well. So let's move on to the artist of the moment, Ellis Hutch. I'd like to hand over to Ellis now and she can kick it off and take us through this wonderful workshop this afternoon. Ellis, over to you. Thank you so much for joining us.
- Thank you so much. It's really wonderful to be here today on Ngunawal country in Canberra. And I would also like to acknowledge the country that I'm on and also pay my respects to elders past, present and those forthcoming and to extend that acknowledgement to all the different places that you are all located on today. It feels very surreal to be here, it's very exciting, and I'm very keen to hear any kind of thoughts or comments or questions from you through the chat as we go on today. There are a couple of things that I'll start with... First is a little bit about me. So as you just heard, I teach, I teach sculpture currently at the ANU School of Art in the sculpture and special practises workshop. And I studied there. I did my first degree there in the early 1990s, and I studied quite a traditional curriculum when I was an undergraduate student, and we did do clay modelling of figures, and we also made relief sculptures. In fact, one of the, my most intensely disliked projects as an undergraduate student was a relief of a still life, the classic sort of bottle and ball. And we had to make this clay relief and then we had to cast it in plaster and then we had to paint it. And so I struggled through that project, and like many things, people do at art school, I didn't understand the value of it until later on. And that doing that kind of close observation, relief carving, representational work is a really great way to hone your observational skills. So even if you end up working in a very abstract way or a very experimental way, having those hand-eye coordination skills and that sense of ability to observe is really useful. And so over the years, I've dipped in and out of working with relief carving, and I've also worked with soap and wax. And in fact, I've made a work for the portrait gallery here in 2015 that was in an exhibition called "All That Fall". And it was, I was given a really exciting brief to make an ephemeral work for an exhibition, inspired by an artist called Theodora Cowan, who was an early 20th century female sculptor. And she'd been commissioned to make a memorial, a war memorial for the First World War. So I was asked to make a response to her work, and I made these huge wax panels because wax is the material that is lost in sculpture, lost wax. You use the wax, it gets melted away to make big bronze casts. And I carved into the surface of the wax shapes and forms that were inspired by Theo Cowen's original sculpture. And then I projected light through those wax forms, so you could see the carving on the other side. And that idea of working with light is very integral to my practise. So skip forward to last year, as you heard the story of trying to work out how to teach students online stuck in their houses without access to tools and workshops. And so working with carving portraiture in soap was the thing that I hit on as a way to work. And something that I discovered when I ran that workshop for my students was that it's so addictive. People just kind of got completely immersed in it. And in fact, I've got a little image here. I'm just putting it on my, the table in front of me. I think there's a camera that can show you. So this is the little sample piece that I made to show the students how to start a relief carving. And it's a really interesting process to think about that relationship between 2D and 3D and moving into 3D, because this is not really quite 3D. It's really somewhere in between and it's a starting point to moving into three dimensions. So it's a nice follow on from the workshops many of you may have already participated in through the portrait gallery, in drawing and watercolour, because if I turn this on its side and have that camera back on there again, you can see that it doesn't come out very far from the surface of the soap. And then when I turn it back you've got this illusion that it looks... Can I get it straight? It looks more three dimensional than it actually is. So we're playing with the same kind of illusory tactics that we use in drawing, but we do have a little bit of capacity to carve in and use light and shadow. And it's actually the shadow that really gives us that illusion of three-dimensionality. So a really great way to get started is just to get a bar of soap. And hopefully you've all got some soap there, and something pointy and try and have a little play with the kinds of marks you can make. And as we get started on that, I'll pull in a blank piece of soap and have a little play with it. There are a couple of little safety hints that it's really good to bear in mind. So when we're working with a material like... This is an unscented soap. If you have a soap that has a scent, and most soap does have some kind of a scent even if it's not heavily perfumed, you can, and you're working really close to it, it can be a bit fumey and it can give you a headache. So it's really good idea to work in a well ventilated space, or if you've got a fan, if you're not in a super well ventilated space to put a fan on, or just make sure that you've got access to fresh air and that you're not really close. If you're working with a scented soap it can be useful to wear a mask if you have one. I'm sure everyone has masks these days. Masks just there.
- It's just a very common thing. So working with that... The other thing, sitting down working on something like this, and especially if you're bent over it, you can get sort of sore shoulders and a stiff neck. So moving around, making sure that you're just paying attention to your body when you're carving is a good thing. And then the last thing to pay attention to also is working with sharps. So I've never injured myself carving soap, and I've injured myself doing pretty much everything else. I'm quite clumsy. So I would say that it's generally a fairly safe exercise, but you are working with something pointy and sometimes you can be working. It can be a little bit slippery. So particularly if you're holding the soap in your hand, just be conscious of how you're using those points so you don't end up stabbing yourself in the hand or that your carving away rather than towards yourself. But generally, I think, if you're working slowly and thoughtfully, you should be pretty right. The tools that I've got here... This is just a ceramics, I'll just put that there, ceramics tool. And I also use a pair of scissors. They're the two things I use most out of anything else. I also use things like a skewer, pointy skewer. Something like this. I'm looking at the camera in reverse. So I'm trying to make sure I don't put things in strange places. Pallet knives, scrapers, anything that has a sharp edge, these are really great for making a kind of flat surface if you've got a really curved piece of soap, you can carve away like that. A pair of scissors is really good for that too. So you can just scrape the surface back to make it flatter, if you want a flat surface, and another really nice thing you can do with any kind of point at all, particularly good with these ceramic tools, just brush that off, is create what's called an undercut. And so if I'm going to scrape away a bit of soap and make a shape, say, I'm making a kind of a cube type shape, I'm just going scrape, scrape, scrape with the side of this pointy bit and I'll show it to you what happens in a second... Scraping in... I'm cutting into the soap in a way that it's very rough here, but I'm just cutting underneath. And what happens then is that there's a shadow there, which makes the carved bit look like it's sitting out. Very, very rough, but if you've got some soap there and you've got some pointy things, just try a little bit of scraping, a little bit of drawing lines, some, you can kind of dig in and create a really nice convex kind of shape, especially if you've got a curve tool. But even if you don't have something with a curved blade on it, you can do that kind of digging in and going around to create this round sort of shape. Something else you might notice as I'm doing this here on this surface, is that I'm not always holding my point like a pencil. So a lot of people, if they've never carved anything will pick a tool like this up and start drawing as if they're drawing with a pencil. It's far more useful, easy, efficient to hold the tool with your hand flat like this or to hold it like this. And to change that sort of hold around depending on what you're doing, because I can scrape along the surface much more efficiently if I'm holding this tool this way or I can kind of go in close if I hold it like that. So I'm making a very big pile of messy soap and not achieving very much right now, other than just showing you a couple of little technical things. So that is a bit of a rundown about using tools and making a couple of different kinds of cuts into the surface. Something else that's really good to be aware of, and when I put that piece on its side before, I'll just show you, this is another, this is a geometrical shape that I made earlier this morning in a workshop, is that when people first start playing with carving, they'll often dig very, very deep into the surface and sort of carve down into the surface. You don't actually need to go very deep and don't need to use very much force. Because again, when I turn that on its side you can see that it doesn't come out very far. So I can be very gentle with my scraping, very light, and just create this tiny little bit of, these tiny little bits of flake. I don't need to dig hard or very deep into the surface, and that I'm letting the light do all the work of creating the illusion that I'm making a semi three-dimensional form. So I'll start making, I'll grab a fresh piece of soap, and I'm gonna start making a shape, just a geometrical shape. And I would suggest that you start with something like a cube or a pyramid, and just carve a three-dimensional or not quite three-dimensional form to see how you go with that. And then we could move on to looking at some portraits and how we start to work with a face. And I'll just give you one quick tip with this bit of soap that I've got sitting here on the desk. What I would do to start with is I will just draw an outline of the shape that I wanna make. So I think I'm gonna make a kind of sphere or maybe a sort of half a sphere kind of semicircle. So I'll just really lightly create the outline for that. So I've got a circular shape there, and then the next thing I'm gonna do is scrape away around it so that it becomes the form that sticks out from the surface. So I'm starting by taking a bit of the outside away and then I'll come back and work on that central form because that will be sitting proud from the surface. And I'm just gonna slowly dig away at it. And as you can see, I'm not sort of digging in or trying to scoop out, I'm just scraping over the surface to create this shape
- Ellis, because it's such delicate work and you don't need to use much force or dig much into the soap, do you need to use particularly sharp implements, or could this be something that parents could kind of experiment with their kids, with, maybe, not the good scissors?
- I think that that's a really great question and absolutely you don't need to use super sharp implements. I've got this kind of barbecue skewer here, which has a quite a sort of flat edge on it. And so I can run my fingers along it. I'm not gonna cut myself on it at all. And I can still, it's not as efficient as using a sharp blade, but I can certainly create the same kinds of results with it and work with that form. And so this is quite a blunt instrument, effectively, to be working with, and I can't get the same exact kind of sharpness of lines, but yeah, I could give this to someone who, a child or someone who doesn't feel comfortable working with really sharp implements. And you can still get a really effective result with that, because the soap itself is not super hard. Different soaps have different qualities, too. Some of them are much more waxy. Some of them are more brittle. So you might find that some of them are much easier to work with than others. And if they've been sitting around for a while and they've kind of dried out they become a lot more powdery. So there, that's something that you can bear in mind when you're working with different kinds of soap. And if a soap has Sorbolene in it or if it's got glycerin in it, or if it's, depending on what the materials are that it's been made out of, it will have different qualities. And also things like the atmosphere. If it's very humid, if it's very hot or cold, things will be more sticky or more brittle, which is very similar if anyone has worked with wax, you find that working with things like a microcrystalline wax which is what that work that I made for the portrait gallery is made out of, that if the temperature in my studio got very hot, the wax would be really sticky and it was much, then it would stick to itself when I was trying to carve it, and that's very similar with soap. And in fact, one of the things you can do, if you've got flake sticking to soap is just use a paintbrush and brush it off with a paint brush as you're working just to kind of make that, make it easier to see what you're doing as the different bits stick to it. So I'm just kind of carving away at this circular form here. And yeah, if people wanna, if you're getting started, if anyone's carving, it will be really great to see what people are working on. What kinds of shapes you've decided to work with.
- I can see lots of-
- Anyone holding things up? Oh, we've got some sunlight soap, one of my favourite things.
- [Gillian] Oh, nice round soap there in the middle too.
- Oh, yeah. Great.
- [Gillian] So wonderful to see so many faces busily creating.
- It is. Yeah. It's, there's a very particular look people get on their faces when they're concentrating that's just delightful, isn't it, to see that look of intensity that people have...
- [Gillian] It's quite meditative, isn't it, really? Like, you sort of lose yourself in there.
- Yeah. Very much so. And I made a couple of test pieces before running this workshop and there was one night where I sat down at about 8:00 PM and I didn't look up to check the time until it was about midnight. And I was really surprised at the hours, they just kind of disappeared. And I'd just been so immersed in what I was doing, which is a thing that I find, I don't know if it's, I'm guessing it's similar for a lot of artists that when I find a process that I really enjoy that it's actually quite dangerous for me to work at nighttime because I do have a day job and I get so immersed that I'll happily sit up all night working and then I will have a very regretful time the next day trying to keep up with everything.
- [Gillian] So art and coffee are definitely things go hand in hand.
- [Ellis] Very much so.
- We do have a question from Margaret who was wondering if you do anything with the shavings leftover from the...
- Oh, that's a great question. I do keep the shavings. I don't do a huge amount of soap carving, but when I do I keep the shavings and I also try and generally work with pure soap. And that means that I can use the soap to make wool wash. If you make a kind of a gel or a slurry out of pure soap you can pop it in your washing machine and you can wash all your woollens with it. I think people who do felting, one of the people in the workshop I was running this morning said that felters use pure soap when they're making, turning things into felt. So if you don't do felting yourself but crafty people, you can save the soap flakes and give it to them, or you can use it... You can even use it to wash your dishes, if you're, if you don't use the dishwasher, which I live by myself, so I often don't feel like I should be using my dishwasher when I don't fill it up very often. And if you are, I think you can still get them. You can get these little holders that you put bars of soap in, and you can sort of run the water over them and use that to wash your dishes. But you can also kind of use soap flakes and just put a little bit of that in your dish washing water and wash your dishes with it. So it's still functional. I haven't tried to use it to wash like in the bath or the shower, but you could potentially do that too. So I've just made this circular form here or oval shaped form. It's pretty rough. I'm not being very careful today.
- [Gillian] I'm interrupting you and distracting you.
- And what I'm doing is I've done an undercut and I'll stop in a sec so you can see, to give it that sense of it's sitting out on the surface, but then I've just, I'm just sort of scraping along the edges, so that adds to that illusion that it's three-dimensional... And I'll just put that down. So it's cut under here, but it's also along the edge that I've scraped. So it's almost like a burnishing, it's just taking the edge off so it doesn't have a square edge on it. And then I'm gonna turn this into a bowl shape just by carving into it. And I'm gonna have to pick up my piece of paper and tip the soap flakes off in a second, but I'll do this a little bit first. So this is a really nice thing that you can play with, and people who've done drawing classes, observational drawing classes will have spent a lot of time drawing vessels, if you're doing traditional drawing classes. So what I've done here just very simply is I've carved in at an angle. And so you can see that there's a shadow on the inside and the lip picks up a bit of light on the outside. So it gives it that sense that there's a hole or an opening. And if I keep going with that and just take that further, I can just give it more of that sense of being a vessel form. And if I'm fairly careful with that edge... No, just take this whole thing back. One of the good things about working with soap is if it's not quite right, you can just scrape it off and start again. And that's the thing that's hard to do when you first start. And I think a lot of people find that also with drawing, it's very hard just to rub it out or scrape it off and start again, because you get really attached to what you're doing and a little bit precious about it. But the good thing about soap is it's super cheap. And you can just say, nah, I'm not really happy with this. And usually when I'm starting something new, it will take me a few goes to work out the composition or how to get it exactly right. So with this vessel form I've just scraped off... Sorry, I should keep that in this spot here, because it's closer to the camera. I've scraped the top section back and now I've got that little bowl type shape that, there it is. Because I wear reading glasses, of course I can see what I'm doing here, as soon as I look up at the screen, I can't see anything. So I've gotta do that thing where I look over my glasses, like a librarian, and I can come back into it like this. So that's a little, very quick little bowl-like form. And that uses some of those tactics of an undercut and also just coming around the edges to create that sort of sense of a 3D, and something that I can show you talking about redoing things... So this is one of the portraits I did last week as a sample piece. And this is our friend Phillip Parker King, who we'll look at again later on. So this version of Mr. King is, it's not entirely like the original but it's got, it's sort of shares some of the features. And I think I started this one three times. So I started it. It wasn't quite right. I scraped it all off. I started it again. I got a second piece of soap and then I had another go at it. So, working backwards and forwards, if you're trying to create something representational. And those of you that have done life drawing would be very familiar with this that you often need to do a few quick sketches. You need to try out a few little test drawings, in life drawing you might do lots and lots of 30 second or one minute drawings before you go into a longer thing. So it's the same with the soap carving. It's something you can work fairly quickly with. And you can try the, get started, try and approach, work out if it works or not, you can scrape it off completely and start again or you can grab another piece of soap and you can have a few little versions of things. And you can also try and look at just individual features, which will be the next thing that we have a look at here is picking at an eye or a nose, for example, and see if they'll both be on that little spot in the camera, and honing in on a feature and seeing how you could potentially create that 3D illusion or how you could make it look like an actual person's eye, or in the case of today's exercise, we're working from images, and particularly working from profile images. So this morning I was running a workshop here in the gallery with a few attendees. And one of the people in the workshop is actually a jeweller. And she was saying, she's got lots of books sort of mediaeval jewellery and ancient jewellery and lots and lots of images of cameos. And she has one particular book that has all of these relief carvings of the portraits. And she said, there's about 1,000 images in the book and there are two of them that are straight on facing forwards. That they're mostly all in profile, because then you can get that shape of the, you know, the brow and the nose and you can build up from there. And if we go back to Mr. King here, let me put my glasses on so I can see him, that profile is really distinctive and it's a really fun one to work with. He's got such an excellent nose. And so that makes it kind of quite easy to copy. And I'll ask our wonderful tech folks here to bring up on the screen. I've got a couple of images of Lady Jane Franklin and Mrs. Grey, I think, coming up, so you can see Mrs. Grey there. She's not very 3D. She's quite, she's a quite a subtle carving. And I particularly love in that image her, the way her hand is coming out of her garments there. And you've got this real sense of the fabric going over the hand and the hand sort of coming forwards. It's a really lovely, subtle work by Teresa Walker. And if we go and move on to look at Jane Franklin, she's a much more three-dimensional image there. So she's a carved marble, and you can see that she's really coming out from that background. And so that's a bit of an evidence of that difference between a very what we'd call low relief, which is lady Grey, and that more kind of higher relief and work kind of coming into three dimensions of Jane Franklin. But I think Jane Franklin is a really lovely one to look at for the next exercise, which is to pick nose, eyes or maybe lips, and just work on one feature. And you might have an image at home, something lying around, where that you can look at, or we'll certainly, we'll put some closeups up on the screen here and you could work from the screen as well. I think that giving yourself that exercise of trying to work out how to just work on that one feature is a really nice practise observational opportunity. And I've got a very not accurate one here that was inspired by lady Franklin, that I've put on the table here, and you can see that it's a completely different face shape. And it's an unfinished one. And I wanted to bring this out and show you something that I'd been working on that I hadn't finished. So you can see some of those details where I've got one eye that's sort of almost there and the other eye's not in the right spot. And it's just a kind of lumpy bulge at the moment, but I can go back and work into that. And also with this one, I've been really playing with that composition of the undercuts around the face and the neck and shoulder, so that the sort of the soap kind of goes in and out of that 2D, 3D form. And if I tilt it that way it might be a bit easier to see. I'm not sure. So yes, the next suggestion I would make is have a go at one of Jane Franklins facial features. And I know we've got some closeups, I think, of parts of her face for people to look at. And also if there's any questions or comments or things people wanna share, please pop them in the chat. And while we're looking at her on the screen, something that's really interesting to look at is the relationship between the eyeball and the eyelids, and a lot of the time when people start to carve an eye, and I'll show you an example, is they might start by going, ah, an eye is this shape. So they do this shape. That's the space of the eye in between the eyelids. And they end up with a shape like that. And then they start doing an eyelid around it like this. And so, while that gives us those kinds of lines that we see, we recognise as an eye, the shape of an eye is actually, you know, the part that's in between our eyelids is just one section of a sphere, and our eyelids come over that sphere. So treating the whole sphere and the eye socket as one thing and starting from... I'm pointing at my own face here, but I'll look at, I'll bring a picture of Jane onto the desk. I could do... If we look at this picture that I have, we've got that... I just wanted to be able to point at a feature.
- [Gillian] We can do that.
- So if we're looking at her eye, in fact, I'm gonna draw with pencil, and we start by taking the whole this shape here, rather than this in-between bit between the eyelids. And so when we start our carving, we're thinking about the whole eyeball shape. And I'm going back to my bit of soap. And so I'm carving the whole eyeball shape. I'm gonna do this very messily. And then what I'm gonna do is carve around... As I started right at the very beginning, carve away some of the soap first. And so the portrait gallery has these wonderful objects in its collection that are these little wax medallions and relief carvings of all sorts of interesting people. And Jane Franklin was particularly interesting person. And it's quite lovely to have her portraits of a couple of colonial women to look at today, because they were given a pretty hard time. They were referred to often as too bold, too forthright, too outspoken. Jane Franklin was criticised a lot for being opinionated and outspoken, for not sort of standing back and being a nice polite lady. And she was also incredibly loyal to her husband, who was lost in an expedition up in the Arctic. The whole expedition was lost, and it's quite a famous sort of story of the Franklin expedition that went missing. I think they were trying to find a particular passage, the northwest passage or somewhere up through Antarctica. And if I remember the story correctly they were actually poisoned because they were eating food that was in tins that had lead lining or lead seams or something. But at the time that Lady Franklin was campaigning for the expedition to be rescued or to be searched for, no one knew what had happened. They'd just sort of disappeared off into the Arctic, and she campaigned relentlessly for there to be search expeditions and rescue expeditions and she became quite an expert on the Arctic in the process. She did a lot of study and learning and looking at maps and finding out what kind of potential places they might've ended up. And so her, the character traits she was criticised for, that outspokenness were actually character traits that meant that eventually, I think, some answers were found, the expedition was, everyone was lost. And yeah, so I think it's really interesting that these kind of colonial women, Lady Grey as well was heavily criticised for being not a very nice person. And she had an incredibly volatile relationship with her husband and there's actually a portrait of him in the collection as well. And someone, I don't know if it was one of the staff who was telling me how the two portraits often get shown facing away from each other because they had this, they separated and they got back together and they separated again. And it was a very fraught relationship. And lady Grey did not like living in the colonies. I think she was very unimpressed by being in Australia and then in New Zealand, has her lot being married to Mr. Grey, who was apparently credited with getting, was it the South Australian government out of debt? The early colonial government was very heavily in debt and he was a very severe financial manager and he did a lot of work to get the colony back in the black, but it was considered to be, I think, quite unpopular and abstemious as part of that. So it's always really fascinating to look at these portraits which I think the Jane Grey one is fascinating because it's so gentle and delicate and beautiful and Theresa Walker's work is so subtle. And then to read these stories that don't seem to reflect the stories of her being this kind of unpleasant person, but then Teresa Walker herself who's a beautiful colonial sculptor, had, was also criticised for being forthright, outspoken and eccentric. So I think if you were a woman in the colonies and you had any kind of an opinion, you were always subject to this sort of criticism or censure, and a really great to, sort of, to recognise women colonial artists because they don't get as much recognition often as their male counterparts. And in this year of the Know My Name campaign that the National Gallery's been running it's great to celebrate those artists who are maybe we're not as familiar with. So I'm taking quite a bit of time on this eye here, carving into this piece of soap, and I'm just gonna look back at the photocopies. So I've made this very rough kind of form and I'm working quite large. I think one of the things that people tend to do when they first start carving with sope is work really, really, sorry, I'll put this down here, really tiny. And it's hard when you're working very small to get a lot of detail. So if you pick up one single feature and you work quite big, it's easier to work out how to get it to work and be able to make changes to it if you need to change it. So what we've got then with Jane Franklin's eyes is I've got this very rough convex shape. And then I'm drawing back into it to create this sense of a, an eyelid that's coming over the eyeball, and I'm doing this in a very messy way at the moment. So just to kind of create an idea, it's not gonna look much like her eyes, because the problem is, of course, that I'm talking a lot and in the talking I'm not paying attention quite as much to what I'm doing. So you'll get me talking and being very inaccurate with my carving rather than being accurate with my carving and silent. And something that when I'm carving at home I love to do is put on a podcast and listen to a podcast and just quietly carve away.
- [Gillian] If anyone has any questions that I like to ask Ellis while they're here?
- Ah, yes, please do ask me some questions.
- [Gillian] Pop them in the chat. Either the chat or the Facebook Live comments. We love questions. Because a few people up there too busy to...
- Yeah. It's, I find that people just get completely immersed in the carving, because it's a very pleasurable thing to do. I find it very pleasurable and I get the impression that a lot of other people do as well. And we did have some emails backwards and forwards in the preparation for this workshop, where, apparently, carving soap, there's a whole kind of niche interest group on the internet who are into ASMR, which is that sensory experience of enjoying certain kinds of sounds. And that carving soap has its own whole ASMR interest group of people who will watch and listen to videos of other people carving soap to enjoy that sort of sensory experience of hearing the sound, the scraping of the carving.
- [Gillian] We might go viral with this video, on all kinds of special websites.
- To get some proper, good sound recordings happening.
- [Gillian] Do you ever take, because it could be quite portable, this practise, couldn't it? Do you ever take it out en plein air or outside of the house?
- I haven't, mainly because I tend to find, I like to sit at a table to do it, but you could absolutely take it anywhere. And I think it's one of those things where going on holidays or going and doing an artist residency or something, it'd be really nice to easily take these kinds of tools and work with them in other places. And I had, someone commented, I was posting about this workshop on Facebook and Instagram and telling people I was doing it. And one of my acquaintances commented on the Instagram, I think it was the Facebook post, about using Pears soap, because you can see through it, it's got that beautiful amber kind of quality. And it led me to think that would be such a wonderful material to carve insects out of, because you'd have these kinds of look, that it would look like they were made out of amber. So I think I'll give that a try sometime. And I have got quite an extensive collection of cicada, cicada bodies and wings at home at the moment, because we had such a good summer for cicadas. So I collected a whole stack of them. So you might see me producing a whole stack of cicada soap carvings.
- [Gillian] Question from Punch who's carving in wax at the moment. And they were wondering if it's easier, if soap is easier for a beginner?
- I would probably say yes. I, although it very much depends on the kind of of wax you're using, because waxes have different levels of being brittle or malleable or soft or hard. And I know that something like paraffin wax, for example, is quite powdery and brittle, but then something like beeswax is very soft. And so it would really depend a lot on the kind of wax that you're carving with. And some waxes are really, you'd think they might be real easy to carve with and they're actually not. The wax carvings that I was doing when I made the work for the, for here, for the portrait gallery, were a particular kind of microcrystalline wax and they were fairly easy to carve. Probably no harder then carving soap.
- [Gillian] Ellis, can you see the screen?
- Oh, yes.
- Punch carving in wax.
- That's fantastic.
- [Gillian] A beloved pet?
- It's gorgeous.
- [Gillian] Yeah.
- That's really lovely. Oh, that's great. And so that reminds me while we are sitting here doing this is that with both wax and soap you can get really beautiful effects if you put a light behind it. So if I put this light on the table here and stick a piece of soap on it, you get this lovely, it's almost like a cameo type effect. And I don't know if that's blowing out on the camera or you can see if I move it away or close, that it's, that works. Yep. And so this is a really nice thing to play with. And in fact, an artist that I went to art school with who's also a Canberra based artist, Ham Darroch, he made a whole stack of work when he first finished art school where he did soap carvings, and he put a little timber frame around them and a little light behind them. And so the work sat on the wall and he had a little switch on top. So you press the switch and it would light up and you'd see that change and the light coming through the soap and that you could turn it off again. So I don't know if he has any of those works any more, but it was a very delightful mechanism for showing these beautiful little carvings. And I think from memory, his carvings were little sorts of domestic interiors. So carvings of lampshades and things like that. So there's certainly people out there who are using these as a contemporary art medium, as well as something we can do as a sort of delightful hobby. It it's being used in a whole range of different ways.
- [Gillian] Probably leads into a good question from Margaret, who's wondering, once the work is completed how long would a soap sculpture last and is there a good way to preserve it or protect it?
- That is a really good question. And in fact I'm not exactly sure how long a soap sculpture would last because the ones that I made more than 20 years ago I didn't hang on to and I tend to shed work. I work in a very sort of ephemeral way. So I would say that as long as it's not damp, you'll be fine. If it's stored in a dry environment. What will happen to soap over time is it does tend to shrink a bit because if there's moisture in it, the moisture will eventually dry out and the soap itself will shrink. But if it's kept in a dry and fairly stable environment I can't see why it wouldn't last for indefinitely. If it gets dusty, or if it's in an environment where the humidity changes a lot, which is pretty much the same thing, anything any kind of art and particularly things like works on paper, if they're in an environment where the humidity goes up and down, they'll expand and contract and crack and wrinkle. And the same goes for soap. If you've seen very old soap that's been used and then left, it kind of splits as it dries out. So that would be the thing I'd say if you were making soap carvings in you wanted to keep them is keep them in an environment where the humidity is not very hugely variable. So don't keep them in your bathroom, for example. Yeah.
- [Gillian] Get accidentally put in the bath.
- And I'm all for making things not necessarily to treat them preciously and keep them forever either, but to have them in the moment or have them for a sort of experience or a certain amount of time. And then for them to, you know, be used or be given away or be shared...
- [Gillian] We've got some people showing us their-
- Their soap carvings?
- Their eyes.
- Ah, great! Got a few coming. Beautiful.
- [Gillian] And Mel was holding up her sunlight soap.
- Excellent.
- Here we go.
- Sunlight soap is a particular favourite of mine because I made a massive work out of sunlight soap in the '90s, a long time ago now.
- [Gillian] We have some pictures of that.
- And I spent time sitting in the art gallery out at Strathnairn, which is an old farmhouse, hand cutting up blocks of sunlight soap into tiles and then tiling the walls of the gallery. It was an amazing project and the smell was just completely overpowering in the space. And something that was really interesting for me was that when audiences came into that space they would start compulsively telling me all of these incredible stories that this, that having this smell that triggered memory in the space meant that people would come in and talk about having their mouths washed out with soap when they were naughty children or remembering growing up in an era where their mother hand washed all of their clothes in a big copper and then rung them out in a ringer. So one of the things I did that was an unexpected part of that, became an unexpected part of that exhibition was collected of those stories and recorded them. And it really made me conscious that the materiality is so powerful when you're making objects and that it really significantly contributes to how people understand those objects, and what they mean, what they mean to people. And yeah, so that the soap is a, it's a great material to carve with, but it also has all these associations. And as an artist you can really play with those associations. So you can start to think about soap having associations with animal fat and having associations with cleaning and the different kinds of scented soaps have different associations and that Pears soap as well, that beautiful transparency. So if you're using soap to carve with, you can really make the most of that, the kind of the meaning that it has inherent in it. And I should check, how are we going for time here, 10 to three, going pretty well.
- [Gillian] Shayne did have a question which interestingly enough crops up in all of our workshops, not just soap carving, but he's wondering how you stop from fiddling with the details.
- Ah, look, I do get stuck fiddling with the details and I think that's one of those things that's really about practise. And sometimes, for me, if I feel like I'm fiddling with the details, I just need to stop altogether and start doing something else. And I certainly have found that, and those of you that have done a lot of life drawing will find this too, that doing a kind of, particularly with a face, trying to block the whole thing in and then go and work through overall, a bit on every section, and slowly come to the point where you're working into the details is one strategy that a lot of people use, but you've may have seen paintings, hand-finished paintings that some people start in one corner and they work the whole way through. And they work at the same level of detail the whole way across. So it's sort of a different process for different people. But I think the thing about fiddling with the details and something that I've certainly done is once you've fiddled enough of the details that you've completely destroyed your work or you've gone too far with it, you sort of learn to pull back a bit. And so sometimes going, taking it so far that you've wrecked it is a really good learning experience, because you kind of know, you start to judge when you need to stop and pull back and have a break. And also, if I'm fiddling with the details, that might be a sign that I need to put it down go and have a cup of tea, put it away until tomorrow and then come back to it and have another look at it, because sometimes I'm fiddling with a detail because it doesn't feel right or something's not working. And when I come back and look at it later on, I realised that the thing that I was focused on isn't the problem anyway, it's some other part of it that needs to be fixed or dealt with that I haven't really been paying a lot of attention to. So, yeah. Good question. I'm not exactly sure because I certainly find that I get trapped in that one at times, but I think one of the things is just to be conscious of it and to sort of ask yourself if that's what you're doing, you need to take a break. So I'm still working on this eyeball. And something that's quite interesting I think about working on a single facial feature is you do get to work out how it comes together, and that can then help if you work on individual elements like the eye or a nose or lips, that when it comes to doing the whole face you've potentially solved some of the problems in advance. And I've kind of cut too deep into this eye. But one of the things I really noticed when I was looking at Jane Franklin's eyes and that original, that beautiful sculpture that we've been looking at, is that where on the outside of her eye, the upper eyelid kind of goes over the top of the lower eyelid and making that happen in the carving, really paying attention to how those two eyelids sit with each other. And that I'd started trying to do a version of her whole face. And I got totally stuck just on the right eye and left everything else. 'Cause I was having this problem just with that little bit where the outside of the eyelid sits, the upper eyelid sits over the top of the bottom eyelid. And so that's where stopping the whole face and going and just looking at that eye and resolving that relationship and then coming back to the whole face and being able to do the eye, understanding what that relationship was, I think is really helpful. So if I was going to do a whole series of soap carved portraits, I'd probably do quite a few separate ones that focus on details. And then I would take those details back into the whole face portrait. And I've just cut too far into my eyelid here as well. So... Nice thing about soap is if you cut too far you can just scrape it all back and keep going, or you can scrape it off and start again. I tend to find, and this is really happening for me today, talking and working means that I will, I'm not being as careful as I would normally be so I'm going a bit too far with some of the aspects, and I might stop doing this eye because I'm doing exactly that. I'm just kind of carving away more and more, and might start looking at a profile or a whole face, but really interested to see how people, where are people up to with your carvings at the moment.
- [Gillian] We'll give a shout out to Kim Scott on Facebook too, who thanked us for taking this out to the regions which is the whole point of these workshops is that we can get to people outside of Canberra and get to people around Australia and around the world.
- I think it's so important and it's been so fascinating as an artist over the last year, just how much we can tap into things happening in other parts of the world and we can attend workshops and talks. And I was completely blown away recently to watch some of those Laurie Anderson talks online, that she's just one of my art heroes, and to get to see her present these really magical Zoom talks, I'll probably never get to see her in the flesh, but having that opportunity to experience someone's work in that way, it's really exciting. So...
- [Gillian] We do have a question from Maggie. Is the curve tool you're using a special tool for sculpting?
- Ah, the curve tool I'm using is a ceramics tool. So you can buy these at art supply stores, ceramic supply stores, $2 shops, reject shops. If you're in a sort of shopping centre, if you've got a kind of an art supply store or one of those kind of everything bargain shops, you can often pick up these tools in the sort of arty crafty section. And sometimes they come in packs. So you get a whole bunch of different tools in the pack that have pointy bits and round bits. And we've got another one here. This other one that I've just put down on the table is another ceramics carving tool that just has a kind of a loop shape on it and you can carve really easily with that. The other thing that is a really great, and I don't have any on the table with me, is a really great tool to use, are lino cutting tool and you can buy them at art supply stores as well. And often they come in a pack of three or four and they've got different shaped blades on the end of them and etching tools. So scissors are also, like, quite sharp, pointy scissors can be a really nice thing to work with and I often will carve away at things with scissors too. So yeah, the short answer is it is a specialist tool for ceramics. They're very easy to get hold of. And they're usually pretty cheap as well.
- [Gillian] Very affordable art form, this one, isn't it?
- It is! It is a very affordable art form and I'm a big advocate of affordable art forms. I've spent a lot of my practise over the last 20 years working with things like masking tape and cardboard and paper and very freely available and non-specialist materials. And I think it's always an interesting challenge to try and work with materials that are considered to be ordinary and not special, but to transform them into something that creates that sort of sense of joy or wonder. And as someone who... I do art as my life and make a living and teach, but I also like to make things for pleasure. And so just having things to hand that you can pick up and work with and throw away at the end, that are not sort of precious things that you need to hang on to or find ways to store, or that cost a lot to make. And certainly in sculpture, as a sculpture student, I was looking at people who were working in bronze and these incredibly permanent media and also incredibly expensive and taking lots and lots of people to make. And bronze sculpture is stunningly beautiful. And I know some amazingly skilled artists who work in those areas, but for me, the idea of committing things to permanency, it doesn't always sit well with that sort of idea that we're living in a society where we're just producing so much stuff and we have to find ways to deal with all that stuff. And there's so much waste that we're producing all the time, and our galleries and institutions are filling up with things as well. So I'm not really looking to make things that have a sense of a legacy to last into the future. I'm really much more about making things that are part of a conversation with audiences now. And so maybe I'm shooting myself in the foot. I'm not gonna go down in history because nothing will exist after I'm gone...
- [Gillian] Viral soap carving video.
- Yeah, possibly. Yeah. I'll leave it somewhere on the internet. Just before I move on to looking at a profile of a face. Does anyone else have any questions?
- [Gillian] We haven't had any other questions coming. Oh, I'm sorry. I think Maggie did us one way back about the scraping off and starting again. Do you take the complete surface off it?
- Yeah. So this kind of mangled eye that I've been working on while I've been talking...
- Oh, we're gonna scrape off?
- I'll scrape that off. So I'll just take the scissors and I'll just scrape it back completely to a flat surface. And this can be very liberating if you're in that feedback loop of I'm working on this one detail and I'm stuck on it and I keep fiddling around the edges with it and I'm not getting anywhere. And I'm just digging a deeper and deeper hole for myself. And you're literally digging a hole for yourself when you're doing this. You can just scrape it back. And then you've got a completely fresh surface to work with. I'm doing this pretty roughly. If I was being a bit more careful with this I'd get it much more, much flatter, but yet just scrape it off, and you can do that with part of something. So you can have something that you're working on and you don't want to scrap the entire thing away. So, for example, I've got this little one here that I did this morning of Mrs. Grey. So I sort of started off with this and I can look at it and sort of go, no, I think there's, it's kind of okay. The nose is not quite at the right angle. I'm not really sure. I might just scrape a bit of that back there, change the angle of her nose and sort of scrape around it, and then not really convinced about what's going on with her hair. So I might sort of scrape half of it off on this side and leave part of the profile there. So I'm not getting rid of it completely, but I'm losing a little bit of it with the thought that wasn't 100% happy with this composition. So I'll just take a bit of it away and start again or work back into it. So you can scrape it all off. You can scrape part of it off. This is a different kind of soap. And I'm really noticing that it's a bit more waxy than the other one I'm working with. So it does, the surface does respond differently to this scraping, but yeah, because it's soap and because part of the reason I'm doing the soap carving is out of the joy of doing the soap carving. If I don't end up with anything at the end, it's not the end of the world. So I think I'll look at a profile... And before I do that, I'm just gonna empty some of these soap flakes off my table. I'm getting covered in soap here. So I'll just tip this out. And I'll just pop another piece that I made. This is one that I prepared earlier. So we were looking at Jane Grey and, no, sorry, Jane Franklin and lady Grey. And that sort of relationship between the sort of the 2D and the 3D. And this other subject that I've got sitting here is Phillip Parker King, who I was really taken by this portrait because he's just got such a great nose, and working with someone who has really distinctive features, it can mean that it has a very kind of caricatured look about it. But also if you're starting to work with portraiture, it gives you something very straightforward and obvious to depict. It's sort of like this person has a nose that's a very distinctive shape. So I can really start with that profile. And one of the things that can be helpful if you're working from an image is even if you've got a print out, which I've got here and I'll just stick down on the table, is I will get a pencil and I'll just trace around the person's profile, around their nose and their brow. So I can understand how that looks and see that there's this shape. And it goes in here and it comes out there. And obviously in real life we don't have big black lines around our facial features, but working from an image to a carving, this is just one little strategy to be able to see clearly what that shape is. And then to translate that into a carving. And I haven't quite got the angle of his nose right there. It's not exactly right, but it's sort of, it's somewhere in the general vicinity. And what you could potentially do if you're really wanting to get that profile accurate is you could photocopy this to the scale of the piece of soap and even trace it onto a piece of tracing paper and trace the profile onto the soap. And then you would have that correct kind of outline to work back from. I clearly didn't do this in this case because his nose is sort of sticking out a bit more and not kind of going down as much, but I did use the printout. And one of the things I did, and I'm just gonna do it like this, is I turned it upside down when I was copying from the image, so that as I was making this profile, and those of you who've done a lot of drawing would be familiar with this technique, if you turn something upside down, it just sort of, it's like a circuit breaker in your brain. Our brains absolutely love shortcuts. And so we'll look at something and our brain will say, that's a face. I know what a face looks like. And then our eyes will just disengage. And we won't actually be observing very accurately. And we'll draw the thing that our brain knows is a nose or an eye. That's often not an observational record, but is a symbol. And so in the most extreme case things like emoticons or, you know, a circle with two dots and a U is a smiley face and we all recognise that as a smiley face, there's nothing in there that looks like an actual human face. And so our brains are great at creating symbols and shortcuts. And so one way to sort of get around our brains' habit of short-cutting is to turn an image upside down so that then, when I'm looking at the upside down image, I'm noticing the lines and the relationship between the angles. I'm not thinking that's a nose or that's an eye, or that's an ear. And it's a very well-known strategy that a lot of drawing teachers use, and it does work quite well with this technique of doing, making portraits, relief portraits. And so I'm just scraping away at this nose thinking I might be able to get it a bit more, get that angle a bit closer to how it should be.
- [Gillian] Do you ever work from life, Ellis?
- I haven't done... I've never done any carving from life. I've done a lot of life drawing over the years, but I've never tried to work from life in this form. And I haven't done a lot of portraiture carving. So, really, I've, when I've carved soap in the past or carved wax in the past, it's been more abstract or I did a whole series when I was a student that were little kinds of architectural spaces. And so portraiture is not the kind of realm of my own practise. And this particular project came out of teaching this course at art school, that the title of the course was politics of bodies, and, which was so great to teach last year during COVID and in shutdown and on Zoom with Black Lives Matter and all this stuff going on around the world, and all of this incredible stuff about spatial social distancing and the way that being a body in society was politicised in all sorts of ways, or it became more obvious the kind of politics of our own relationships, social relationships. And so the portrait, soap carving portrait exercise I devised for my students when we were starting to think about the relationship between portraiture and power, and the kinds of incredible situations we're seeing around the world where colonial statues were being pulled down and destroyed and thrown in rivers and replaced. And so looking at these colonial figures and thinking about who they were and that process of kind of memorialising or creating documents, and the, I didn't ask my students to reproduce colonial portraits. I actually asked them to start to think about creating self-portraits and thinking about what the function of portraiture might be today in a society that, particularly in Australia, where, you know, we're still, we're not really a post-colonial society, we're still very much a colonial place and we're still operating within a lot of these kinds of colonising systems too. So to think about what is the role of portraiture is a really interesting question. And I'm sure that you working here at the portrait gallery are asking those questions all the time and having these conversations at all sorts of different levels. So that's a very long answer to say that I don't normally make portraits inside. And so I haven't tried doing it as a life exercise. Although when I was an undergraduate student, I certainly did sculpture, life modelling sculpture in clay and working from a life model and we did a full body clay modelling exercise that went on for several weeks, where we had the same model for two or three days a week, and we'd come in and we would actually sit there and do the whole modelling with our teacher, Ante Dabro, who has a few sculptures around, commissions around Canberra. And something that was really interesting for me was then, many years later, I was a model for a portrait sculpting class. So I got to sit and watch the students make portraits of me. And it was fascinating to see people modelling my face, but every single person did it so differently. And there were always some of their own features in there. It's sort of this really... And I think people who've done a lot of life drawing see that too, that life drawing classes, you see people, drawing their own body shape as well as the model. It's often this combination, like tall people stretch everyone and short people shorten everyone, and, you know, very thin people make people more angular. And it's sort of like we know our own bodies and we know ourselves so intimately that we apply our experience of the world to the way that we represent other bodies. And this is a bit of a tangent, but I would highly recommend to anyone who's willing to take their clothes off, that being a life model is a really fascinating and affirming experience, because you see that no one sees you the way you see yourself. And so you shouldn't, you don't need to worry about judging yourself because no one sees you, no one judges you the way you judge yourself, and they see you in completely different ways according to the way that they see themselves. So I know it sounds like a bit of a stretch for a lot of people, but life modelling is, it's very interesting and educational experience. I've gone off on an incredible tangent here and I'm really curious to know what our audience are doing right now, because I'm wondering if they've started looking at Mr. King and seeing if I can create a profile. If anyone's had a go at that yet, or if you're working on the things you've already been continuing, you're continuing what you've been working away at? So you could see a couple of people holding things up over there. Lots of beautiful concentrating faces. It's wonderful. I love it, seeing those, that intense concentration.
- [Gillian] There were a couple of people who had other people with them as they were creating, oh, Punch's just turned her camera on. They could potentially use each other as models...
- Yes, they could.
- [Gillian] Life modelling for soap carving perhaps.
- Here we've got quite a few people working steadily away there. And curious if anyone's been working upside down. We haven't, we've got the image the right way up on the screen.
- We do, yes.
- So it it's, I don't know if other people are having the same situation, but because I wear reading glasses I'm sort of switching backwards and forwards between looking at this with glasses on glasses off, and to keep remembering to put my glasses on so I can see what I'm doing. But I think it's always really interesting to look at... And I was talking about this, it kind of relates to that thing before about our brains being really good at shortcuts is sometimes when you look closely at an image or an object, and I think it works really well with Phillip King who's up on the screen is if you look at the shape of his eyelid, and what we know or experience about our own eyelids, but then when I looked at when I was trying to carve his eyelid and I kept getting it wrong, and then I started looking at it, I thought, oh, that's just basically a flat triangle. And if I make a flat triangle rather than thinking about that that's an eyelid, and I really look at that just as the shape on its own... As soon as I changed my thinking about what that form was that I was trying to represent, I suddenly became a lot more accurate with how I was getting that shape. And also that the shape of his eyeball as well as this kind of, having this kind of a convex form that sits underneath that eyelid and curves down. And then this really lovely curve beneath his eyeball, where you can sort of see the curve of the eyeball underneath the eyelid and going into his cheek and just really looking at the sort of forms and the planes. And another thing that is delightful about carving with soap. And I'll just put this back down. See in my not entirely accurate carving of Philip Parker King, is that because of the way that the soap picks up light you don't need to do a huge amount of carving to create a plane that gives you a bit of a sense of the roundness of the cheek or that little bit of his extra double chin under there, that even just a tiny bit of a scrape her and there changes the form and gives you that sort of sense of the flesh, the fleshiness of the face. And I was really impressed by that, though I didn't need to go really intensely three-dimensional with that carving, I could just grab a tiny little bit away, it would change the way the light hits it and it will make it a bit more concave or a bit more convex. And then it would give a sense of the sort of movement over the surface of the skin. And I think that that's something that I really enjoyed playing around with, both with Phillip Parker Kings chin and that sort of, that fleshy bit underneath, and also in this little one here, which is sort of, I would say, inspired by Jane Franklin, but certainly not an accurate representation, but starting to kind of try and work out how to deal with the form of the chin and the form underneath her mouth by just really gently kind of carving into that and getting that sense of where it protrudes and catches the light. And I think that's another thing that is always incredibly difficult to do with... Figurative sculptor is lips. And you often see people trying to sculpt lips where they sort of look like two sausages, and sort of an upper sausage and a lower sausage, and sort of trying to really get that understanding of that relationship between the nose and the mouth and the way that the lips sort of cut in. And I was really struggling with this one, with the lips for quite a while, until I made a similar discovery to the discovery I made about the eyelid, which is, ah, the bottom lip sort of sits underneath the upper lip. And if I actually just carved out the bottom lip and I pay attention to the bottom lip and I don't think about the upper lip, the upper lip sort of forms as, in result or in response to that. So I concentrated on the bottom lip and then I could just carve back to sort of shape the upper lip. So this is little tricks that you can work out just by questioning what you're seeing and trying to move beyond those habits of how we think lips look or how we think eyes and noses look to trying to see it not as an eye or a nose or a mouth, but as a form with shadow and light and trying to follow where the shadows go or where the light goes. And that helps to create that understanding of the relationship. I'm just gonna stop and have a sip of water.
- [Gillian] One other question about whether you could use soap sculptures as a mould to then cast on a longer lasting material form?
- I think you could definitely do that. And there'd be a number of different ways you could do that. Probably the most straightforward would be with plaster. And the nice thing about soap is plaster won't stick to it, because the soap has this sort of waxy surface. The one thing you'd need to be conscious of is to not have very, very deep undercuts, because if you made a little wall around your soap block and poured plaster into it, if you had very curved and undercut areas, the plaster would go into that and then it would kind of pull out. But one thing a lot of people who do a lot of casting will do if they've got a form that has those kinds of undercuts in it is that they might fill those in with a little bit of clay or something, something that can be removed so you can make your cast and then you can carve those undercuts back in later on. You could potentially use something like Silicon or latex as well. I don't see why you couldn't use one of those. And if you use latex, for example, you would paint a couple of layers of latex on, and that would get the detail of Silicon. And then you could put plaster over the top which would give you the support structure. So that then when you turn it inside, well, when you take it off, then you've got a soft mould that you could pour plaster into, which means that you could peel that soft mould off and you'd have your positive coming out. And so the soft mould then where you've got the undercuts you can just kind of peel it away or pull it out from those undercut sections. So I'm, I haven't done much casting and it's been a while since I've done any casting, but I would certainly think it would be very possible to cast, and that there would be a number of different ways you could potentially, different materials you could potentially use. So a lot of people use that dental kind of gel stuff. I think that would be a really easy medium also to work with. And if you use that to create your negative then you could pour plaster or even wax into the positive and make a positive wax. And some of the objects in your collection are cast wax. So they would have been... I speculate they would have been made in clay first. Then they would have been cast in plaster and then they would have poured the molten wax into the plaster mould and used a sort of wax plaster combo, because I don't, I suspect they didn't have dental gel in 1800s. So wax and plaster and clay I think would be the main materials that they were working backwards and forwards between. Possibly there might have been originals that were carved in something like marble and then reproductions made. A lot of colonial sculptors were making multiples and selling them as a way of making a living. So there's very famous sculptures that the portrait gallery own copies of, and also the national gallery have of, the Tasmanian's Truganini and Moretti were made as multiples and sold. And in fact, Phillip Parker King was sculpted by Thomas Wallner who was a pre-Raphaelite artist who came out to Australia in the gold rush, hoping to make his fortune in gold. And instead he made a living making portraits, because he didn't find gold and make his fortune. And I think he did end up going back to the UK, and anyone who travelled to Canberra to see the pre-Raphaelite exhibition at the national gallery would have seen some of his paintings in that exhibition. So he was one of the, I think one of the founding members of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, I can't remember the exact story. So in his case, the portraiture work was really his bread and butter work and that, making a living, making, working to commission, people commissioning portraits, which is pretty much the way, you know, portraiture continues to be treated today. Today the National Portrait Gallery commissions portraits of well-known Australians in all sorts of different media, our parliamentarians get their portraits painted. So portrait painters have this kind of income stream that comes from that kind of commissioned work, which is quite different to a lot of other contemporary artists, painters, sculptors, who are sort of working on, making bodies of work and then trying to find an audience or someone to sell it. Portraiture is often created as a commission. It's the person coming to the artists and saying we want you to make this, or I need that. And artists that paint portraits that are not commissions, it's incredibly difficult work to sell, because it's some particular person. And so there's not really a market for people to collect portraiture unless they have some kind of a connection to the person who the portrait has been created of. So I think that's very... I'd be really interested to know if there are people out there collecting portraits, just collecting portraits because they think portraits are interesting. So maybe we could, someone could let us know if they have active portrait collecting. Yeah. Yeah. And I also sat for a portrait painting class here a couple of years ago and watching that process of painting portraits is really fascinating too. So, and it's very weird when you see a class full of not entirely accurate paintings. It can be quite confronting at times, but, yeah, I'm wondering, we've still got quite a lot of time left and I wanna make sure that people who are there have enough information to go on with, because I know that this is a very mesmerising thing and I just like to give people a chance to do whatever they're doing, but also if they're wanting more information or techniques or feedback or prompts or a new thing to look at and to work from, with, we could look at some more close-ups or we could just continue on with what we've got up on the screen. Sort of see how people are tracking.
- [Gillian] We did have a question about whether you would consider using the soap carving as a stamp.
- Ooh, I don't know. I don't know how it would work because if something like a rubber stamp, there's flexibility, so that when you stamp, what it, if you're using ink, you've got something that will meet the surface and connect with it, whereas the soap is a hard surface, but you could, I guess if you think of it the way that a seal works, like, you know, a seal ring or a pendant that you put in sealing wax and you create a kind of a marker or a stamp that way, or the those kinds of the stamps that the little blocks that ceramicists use, where they've got a piece of timber or something that they've carved into and they stamp it into the bottom of their clay objects. So you could, I guess, use carved soap to make some kind of an indent into clay or a softer substance that would work like a stamp. So yeah... I don't know if it would work in the way that you could work with like monoprints, where if you put some ink or something on the surface and then you got a soft paper, like rice paper and kind of rubbed it over the surface, if that would give you anything or if it wouldn't really work, because mostly with printmaking surfaces, they're very, very flat, and this is not a flat surface. I guess that's where it would work is if you had a piece of soap, a flat surface and you carved into it without creating that more moulded sort of three-dimensional form. Like, in fact, this, the brand that's been stamped into the soap. If I rolled ink across this and stamped it, I would get a negative where the text has been carved in. So that would work as a kind of stamp. Hmm.
- [Gillian] Somebody else, I was about to say Galaxy, just asked, but it's the name of their tablet. Sorry, sorry, whoever owns the Galaxy tablet. They were wondering how you get such a lovely sheen on the finished work.
- Mm. I don't do anything special. It's really just working with these tools and it's just scraping very lightly. So that it's quite a smooth surface and this is quite a sharp edge, but I think even with a less sharp edge, it's just that very, very light scraping off over the surface. But the soap itself just has inherently has that kind of shiny quality about it. And if you look at, these are two different pieces of soap side to side, the lighter or the whiter one is a slightly more powdery texture and the darker one is a bit more waxy. So they have, they sort of take the light in a slightly different way, but it's really just carving very gently like this or scraping very gently over the surface to take out some of those more bumpy ridged areas. That's what creates the smooth surface there. So I'm not kind of wetting it or burnishing it, although you could potentially burnish the way people work with burnishing ceramics as well. And I'm just, these tools are a bit, they're still got bits of remnant wax on them from working with wax. But if I took that curved, the curved part and sort of scraped it, that would give a different kind of surface too, that might burnish it a little bit. I haven't actually ever tried this. So it'd be interesting to sort of see what happens if that makes it a smoother surface. It does appear to be burnishing it a little bit. But yeah, the surfaces of these are purely created with that scraping of this, the flat blade or the curved blade. And that's it. Nice to see people working still all the way over there.
- [Gillian] I've had a couple of people who've had to leave but they're gonna go on with it.
- Oh, good.
- [Gillian] Thank you very much for the tips.
- Are there any other questions from the Facebook team or from Zoom? Please let us know.
- So I would very much enjoy seeing the results of what people make today and even afterwards, you know, if they share things, I guess they can share things by a Facebook or tag the portrait gallery on Instagram. It'd be really interesting to see what people have come up with after today's session.
- [Gillian] Absolutely. And if anyone's a little bit shy and doesn't wanna send it out to the social media land, you can always email us through bookings@mpg.gov.edu and we can share your creations with Ellis afterwards.
- Oh, that would be fantastic. I'd love to see what happens. I think one of the key aspects or elements about portraiture in any form, drawing, carving, painting is just that sort of continuously going back and looking at it again and correcting and sort of like, ah, that the angle's not quite right. I'm just gonna shift the angle of the nose or the face's a bit longer than it needs to be. So I'm gonna come back in and chop a bit off the bottom of the chin or I'm gonna make the throat a bit more slopey. So it's just that constantly backwards and forwards of kind of critically analysing what's there and correcting it and working with it. And then slowly over time getting kind of a closer and closer representation. And that can be really satisfying, but equally you can just look at the original image or the original work that you're looking at as a starting point. And then from there play with it, get creative, do something else. So you can go down that path of really honing those representational skills. You can also go down that path of what, where can I take this now? What else could I do with it? And use it just as a starting point and a point of inspiration and then continuing on. And I've just, I've gone back to Lady Grey who I started on this morning, and I'm making her nose much bigger and pointier than it actually is. So I might just kind of try and correct that. And there's always that risk that, you know, if you're starting to take something off that you take too much off and then you're back to square one. So we might be... I was telling the group that I was working with this morning about someone that I went to art school with. And that's the other thing that I got to do in my very traditional sculpture training at art school was carving in marble, and our first exercise carving in marble, we were given metal chisels and big hammers and we spent weeks bashing away at these big pieces of marble and chipping tiny little bits off the surface. And once we'd tortured ourselves like that for a while, then we were allowed to move on to the pneumatic power, air powered power tools, where it was like sort of a hammer drill and you could go dah-dah-dah and you can hammer into it. But one of the people in my sculpture class decided that rather than get the precious white smallish chunk of marble, that they would work with sandstone because it's much faster and you can learn more more quickly. So they had a piece of sand stone. That was a huge big piece, while all of us with our smaller bits of marble, and they chipped away, and chipped away, and chipped away at the sandstone. And then they chipped it in half and they had two pieces and they chipped away, chipped away, and they made all these different shapes at the end of the semester, they had a pile of rubble and nothing else. I think they learnt more than anyone else in the class about carving, but I've seen, I've done the same thing myself with the soaps. I'll just take a bit off here and take a bit off there and take a bit off here. And all of a sudden I've taken way too much off where I've dug a huge big hole for myself, but in the process of doing that, it's not, I don't think that's a loss, because that constantly working, you're storing all of that information. And then the next time you make something you can apply what you've learnt. So if you end up with nothing at the end of today's session, you still will have learnt some skills or you've made some observations that you can apply to the next thing you make. And it doesn't mean that you'll necessarily always end up with a pile of rubble at the end, you can move on to having an object at the end rather than a beautiful pile of soap flakes which you can use to wash your clothes. So it's not a complete loss. One of the things that's particularly tricky too about some of these really gorgeous images is that, particularly Lady Grey, the photographs of her, because she's a low relief made out of wax, it's quite hard to see her features. So that this is another one where I'll just put this down on the table where I've actually got a pencil and drawn around her profile, just so I can see that relationship between her nose and her mouth and her chin. That's quite difficult to read looking at the image as it's printed out. So that's very helpful in just kind of getting a sense of the composition or the shape. And in fact, now that I've had that thought that I could just print out a piece at the scale of the piece of soap and trace it, I'm gonna give that a try too, because some people might see that a bit as cheating, but I think it's also, there's really no problem with just finding a good technique to get the results you want, even if that means you're not doing that kind of accurate sort of rendering from one thing to the other, but you're tracing it or you're creating a copy of it. I think any technique that is useful to get the results you want is worth giving a go. it's not a case of it's cheating if you traced it. And it's always, I think, quite fascinating to see how different artists do generate their work and when they might take photos and work from photographs or when they might use projections and trace things onto projections, because there's all sorts of technologies and techniques we can use to get the results we wanna get. And I think it's worth making use of any of them that are worth, that give you those results. So how are people going? Does anyone wanna show us what they're working on? Any work in progress happening up there? I can see one. Oh, ah, nice! That's looking fantastic. Get a really clear look at that face. Yeah. I would, I think I'd love to make a video just of lots of people working because it's just it's very mesmerising to watch other people concentrating, isn't it?
- [Gillian] Absolutely. There you go. Oh, look at that.
- Ah.
- Fantastic.
- That's great!
- [Gillian] Well done. It's terrific. So we've got people working-
- Oh, here's we've got the wax block again.
- [Gillian] There we go. And the iPhone light behind is really great too.
- Yeah. That's a really good little technique.
- [Gillian] Yep. Seeing how the relief, that's terrific. I'm liking how you're attacking the fur of that animal too. It's looking good. I'm curious to see Shayne's efforts too at some point he...
- [Gillian] Oh, come on. We're amongst friends.
- I think I'm just gonna become completely obsessed with noses. That's the thing that I'm finding absolutely fascinating is trying to get people's noses right.
- [Gillian] Is there a particular lighting that you like to work with when you're carving? You say that you often work into the evening?
- Yeah. I usually have a desk lamp on the desk and often it's not a direct overhead light, but it's a light coming from the side so that I can sort of see those shadows and it can be sometimes a case of holding the work up vertically or sort of moving it around. So a really kind of even wash over the work doesn't necessarily help, but something that's a bit more directional creates a bit of contrast, so a sort of a raking light or a slanted light, then you can kind of see the shadows and understand the forms. So yeah, sometimes working at night time in a room that's not super bright but with a lamp can create more exaggerated shadows. And as long as it's not so dim that it's generating eyestrain, it sort of seems to work pretty well to work like that. But also good amounts of daylight is always wonderful. It's so much. And I find, and I'm sure many people who have reached a certain age and have always had good eyesight. And then they've got the old age eyesight decline happening that I can see a lot less at night time than I used to be able to. And so I'm working under brighter lights and making sure that the lights are bright enough is really important for me. And I haven't quite adjusted to my lack of eyesight yet. So I will often find that I forget to make the lighting bright enough and then I'll turn a light off or on or I'll add a lamp and suddenly I can see, and I didn't even realise I couldn't see before that point. So a good amount of light is always helpful. And then that directional light can just give a bit of extra information.
- [Gillian] You were saying before that you're really enjoying working into noses, but is there a good part of the head or face to start from in your opinion?
- Oh, I think it really depends on the angle. So with that, the working on profile, I think it's just getting the whole profile, and there's a lot of similar techniques you can use as you would with drawing. And I'm going to go back to Mr. Parker King and put this image back on the table here, is I'll often do something like look at the profile and I'll just sort of kind of work out what the angle of the face is so I could potentially draw a line like this, so I can see that his, underneath his nose, his upper lip and his bottom lip in his chin are all on a particular slant. And then his brow is on another angle. So sort of doing that, you know, that you see people doing in life drawing classes where they hold their pencil up and they look at it and they turn it to the right angle and then they translate that to the same angle on their drawing, working out the overall shape first and then working back. So it sort of blocking out those angles and being able to kind of get the proportions. And I think proportion is one of the things that people always find difficult when life drawing or creating portraits, is not making a nose that's much bigger than the rest of the face or eyes that are really tiny or those kinds of relationships. So it's not so much starting in one place, but I guess wherever you start it's working out the relationships between that element and the other elements so that things are in proportion. And some of those techniques are things like looking at the negative spaces or the shapes between features. So with Mr. Parker King, one of the really nice things about his profile and his face is this sort of shape of his nose and the relationship between where his nose comes in under the brow and that sort of shape or space between his nose and the eye. And I'm just drawing onto this here so you can see those shapes. If you break this down into kind of shapes, you've got all of these really nice facets that you can work with. And so it becomes almost a kind of geometrical exercise. And in fact, that was one of the things I think was incredibly valuable about going through that quite traditional sculpture training when I did was spending weeks and weeks working with a figure model and modelling in clay and having an old school teacher come and go. That plane, there's no, there's a plane on the leg that joins to the thigh and this way, and it comes around here and you can see how the light's hitting it. And until that, those elements were pointed out to me, I physically couldn't see things. And by the end of that sort of six weeks, or however long it was, of doing that exercise I could actually see things I couldn't see before. And I could understand the way planes shifted and surfaces changed, and I could break things down into shapes and forms. And so those kinds of looking at an image or looking at a life model and being able to say, there's a shape here, a shape here, a form there and breaking it down into the kind of the geometry of the surfaces is the way that I tend to work and trying to not name things and go that's a nose, that's an eye, that's an ear, but that's a shape that sits behind this shape. And there's a series of convex curves or concave curves or looking at the kind of geometry or the angle of things is, and the relationships between those elements and really seeing them in terms of form and shape and trying to step outside or away from the story of a face as a kind of like, this is a, this person, or this is an eye, that's how I kind of break things down in order to be able to work with them. I think I'm repeating myself a bit there but I hope that makes sense.
- Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
- And you'll often find that I think if you've done any life drawing or life modelling, that teachers will talk about that, they'll sort of say, look, you can see this, there's this slanting kind of triangular plane on the face here, and then it recedes and it goes around the corner over there and the light hits it in this direction. So really paying attention to light and shadow and shape and form and breaking things down into those most basic elements and then building them back up from there. So sometimes, that, once you sort of solve problems in particular details, like just honing in on lips or honing in on a nose or honing in on eyes and looking at the shapes and forms... Then when it comes to putting the whole thing together it's really thinking about all the relationships between those elements and working across them all fairly, evenly, in a sense not focusing too much on one particular area until you've got the whole blocked in. And I tend to find with the compositional or the proportional stuff, that if I haven't been doing representation or drawing or modelling for a while that that's the thing that takes a lot of work is getting things in proportion. And then the detail kind of sorts itself out from there once the proportions are right. If the proportions are wrong then everything just doesn't fit together and you have to sort of get rid of whole chunks and sort of start again from scratch or redo it to get it in proportion and get it right.
- [Gillian] Great.
- Oh, I can see some sunlight soap kind of on the edge or a yellow... Oh, that's looking fantastic. You've got quite a good kind of deep high relief almost coming in there. Nice.
- [Gillian] Oh, we've got bags of soap, you can do about 100 portraits out of that lot.
- Oh, nice. It's such a good colour, isn't it?
- [Gillian] Isn't it? It's almost like American cheese.
- It is, yeah. That's sort of very, egg-yolky kind of colour, yeah.
- [Gillian] We sort of touched on this earlier, Ellis, but is there a particular, so profile is perhaps the easiest and then three quarters and then face on, can you tell a proficiency of a, you know, colonial artist or a cover by how much they're showing off in terms of the position of that particular carving?
- I never really thought about it in those terms. I guess from, with low relief, we, you really rarely see a face on carving because it's incredibly difficult to do that. It really lends itself much more to a three-dimensional approach. And certainly off the top of my head as I'm still thinking about it, I'm not visualising any that I can think of that are actually just straight face on, low reliefs, although I'm sure there are. And I would imagine that having a look at, you know, Teresa Walker produced lots and lots of these tiny little beautiful medallions and there quite a few of them in collections around the country. So it'd be interesting to see, to have a look at what she produced and see if there were many that had that kind of face on presentation. But I can't think of any off the top of my head. I haven't been actively looking for them though. So yeah.
- The Queen's always-
- Yes. Yep. She's always profile.
- Yeah. And I think coins are really the place where you see most of these very low relief...
- [Gillian] Shayne's showing us his work.
- Oh, nice. Ah, excellent.
- [Gillian] It's looking great, Shayne.
- You've got that nice kind of plane between the eye on the side of the nose coming down under the eye.
- [Gillian] Is there anyone that you would recommend investigating or following somebody that might've influenced your own artistic practise, Ellis?
- Oh, ah, Hmm. That's a really interesting question. I'm trying to think. It'll be one of those ones where in half an hour's time there'll be 10 people that I can think of, but right off the top of my head I'm just having a total blank at the moment. I think what's kind of interesting about the current moment is there's really not a lot of artists that I know of that are doing a lot of very figurative work. I guess Janine Antoni, as a contemporary artist, it's an American artist, who's done a lot of work with portraiture and figurative sculpture and also kind of critiquing that or playing with that. So she made some works a number of years ago where she cast portraits of herself in chocolate and soap, and then she gnawed away at the chocolate ones. And then she washed, used that washed away at the soap ones. And the title of the work is "Lick and Lather." So you end up seeing this sort of series of objects that are in different states of kind of decay or sort of have been consumed at the edges. And she's done lots of variations or various kinds of works that really interact with that idea of portraiture and self portraiture, and probably, internationally, most famous right now is Mark Quinn because he has done that work where he cast his own head in blood, which was, has been shown in Australia in the past. But also he made this beautiful work of one of the Black Lives Matter activists. And I can't remember her name now, which is terrible, but the sculpture that was pulled down in the UK that I can't remember the name of either. It's all off the top of my head at the moment. Was one of those ones that received international news last year because a bunch of activists pull down this bronze statue in the UK and chucked it in the river of someone who'd been a slave trader, and Mark Quinn made a bronze life sculpture of one of the activists and put it on the pedestal that the colonial sculpture had been removed from, unauthorised. I think it was up for about 24 hours and then it got pulled down, but I thought it was so fascinating that he chose that really traditional high art medium of bronze and made a contemporary work representing someone who is involved in that struggle and sort of putting them in the place of the historical figure who was, you know, under criticism at the time. So his work is pretty interesting as far as someone who both works within those traditional media and those representation systems, but also critiques it and plays with it. And he did this amazing sculpture of another artist that was placed on that huge plinth, I think it's Trafalgar square, The Fourth Plinth or whatever it's called. And again, totally can't remember the name of the subject now, I should have, you know, had a list of names with me. He made this amazing marble sculpture of this woman who is also an artist and she's someone who was born with these birth defects. It means that she doesn't have arms and legs. And she's been quite an activist as someone who refuses to use prosthetic limbs and be uncomfortable in order to be more acceptable to society. So he made this incredibly beautiful marble sculpture of her in her natural state. So I think he's another one that's worth looking at. But I'm just trying to think too, who is, there's an indigenous artist in Australia who made a bronze head in a balaclava that was kind of making a commentary on the whole Captain Cook sort of controversy that's been happening recently. And his name's gone out of my mind, too.
- [Gillian] We're gonna add all of the links into the Zoom chat and our Facebook comments. So-
- All of it.
- [Gillian] Is Mark Quinn's subject who is on the Trafalgar pedestal.
- Excellent.
- Alison Lapper.
- Yeah. I need my phone so I can sort of be Googling along the side too. I can see people still working away up there.
- Jason Wing.
- Oh, Jason Wing. Yes.
- [Gillian] Did the Balaklava at the top of Captain Cook, we can share that in our links too.
- I think it's always really fascinating to see that when contemporary artists are taking traditional forms or processes or practises and using them in a really interesting way to critique some kind of contemporary issues or, not necessarily valorizing those historical forms, but making it a really effective use of them, it's really fascinating to sort of to see those different strategies and approaches. I think a lot of artists working now are sort of, that we have such an incredible wealth of availability of opportunities and this kind of sense that everyone's working in digital media or new media or that you need to be working in ways that are somehow very current. And that sometimes revisiting really ancient techniques and practises can still have a really interesting resonance with what's going on now and can be used in really interesting ways to make commentary or challenge people's ways of thinking. And particularly in relation to our history, thinking about the sort of stories that have or haven't been told and who's telling them, who's being represented. It's really good to question those things.
- [Gillian] You know how we were speaking before about this being so meditative and losing track of time.
- So we're almost out of time.
- [Gillian] I just completely lost track of time. We are actually just about out of time. So perhaps we could get people if they were interested to turn their cameras on and show us what they've been working on.
- That would be fantastic.
- [Gillian] Here we go. Look at those sculptures coming together.
- Wonderful work.
- [Gillian] Fantastic. Thank you so much, everybody. This is tremendous.
- Ah, that's great. I wanna get some of that yellowy orangy soap.
- [Gillian] I think that yellowy orange was Wright's? Yeah, Wright's soap. Beautiful.
- [Ellis] We'll check it out.
- Good work by everybody.
- Oh, nice.
- Yep. They're terrific. Aren't they? Those backlit and that's fantastic. Wonderful. Thank you so much, everybody-
- Thanks, everyone.
- Joining us today. I think that's probably all we have time for, but thank you so much, Ellis.
- Oh, you're most welcome.
- That was absolutely tremendous. And it was so lovely to listen to your commentary as we were, everybody was busily carving and we've had lots of comments about people who would love to go back and rewatch the recording because they've learnt so much. So the recording of this session will be on our website, portrait.gov.au. So we always encourage you guys to jump on our website and check out all of the recordings we have there, under the watch section on our website is where you'll find all those on demand videos. It's also up on Facebook. So please let people know, share with your friends, get the message out about our workshops, because we really really love the fact that Australians are supporting creativity, particularly after the year we've had last year. So, and thank you so much for teaching us.
- It's an absolute pleasure. I had a ball... I'm really, you know, and I loved attending the one that I attended as well. So I'll be back to attend more in the future.
- Thank you so much. Terrific. Thank you, everybody. And yeah, jump on our website. Follow us on social. Get all the information about our next workshop that we've got coming up. And until that time, we'll see you later. Bye-bye, thank you.
