I came across this artist in my enquiry towards sculpture. This is a personal project I pursue. I becan to develop an interest in sculpture when I saw OCA students post pictures of their works. Now I’ve already topped my OCA studies towards a painting degree with the printmaking module, and there’s no way I could add yet another course. Although I’d love too… but the demands in terms of time and focus are beyond what’s possible for me right now.

Nevertheless I want to explore sculpture, so I decided to do it on my own, as time permits, to supplement my OCA studies. I’ve already learnt quite a lot how to approach an art topic that’s interesting, and I intend to loosely follow this one “the OCA way” by writing a blog, doing research on suggested artists, and using project prompts to develop a personal practice as well. I researched academic course syllabi online and found interesting project prompts which I’m going to use to get me started.

The first project I chose is to make a paper sculpture. The project was designed for beginners to sculpture and the only requirements are a minimum size (16 x 16 x 16 inches, which is about 40 cubic centimeters) and that the sculpture should have an interior and an exterior. The task was designed to get students working in 3-dimensions, and it was presented with some paper sculptures from various artists as inspirations.

Now one of these artist was Andreas Kocks (German, contemporary). I chose him for a closer look because I was quite impressed by the sculptures. The first images I saw were those of sculptures that resembled huge-sized splashes of black ink, cut out and mounted to form a three dimensional landscape on the wall. Similar sculptures were made as cut out shapes that were bent inwards or outwards, so they’d create shadows or highlights on the sculpture’s surface.

Now there’s no immediate connection between sculpture and printmaking in general or between these sculptures and the linocut printmaking technique specifically. But while looking at the sculptures, I did search for a connection or a way to translate the idea from sculpture into printmaking.

Monoprinting came to mind: If ink was splashed onto a printing plate and a print pulled from the surface, this would create a “splash print”, shaped by a chance effects in the same way as the original splash of the ink on the plate. By contrast, I could splash some ink on a linoplate and then cut around the splash shapes for a relief print. This print would have a completely different effect, probably a bit like “frozen water” and similar to water depictions in the linocuts by Ian Phillips.

It’s an interesting idea. I might take it up some time in the future.

Resources

Andreas Kocks, Paper sculptures http://pennstatesculpture.blogspot.com/2012/08/andreas-kocks-paper-project.html

Andreas Kocks artist website http://www.andreaskocks.com/index.html