One of my discourses....

My discourse as an artist lies in the never-ending quest of filling the gap that remains between my two halves. Part of me wants to be an artist who is constantly creating, part of me wants to help those in need and have a social connection to the world, and in the middle lies a gap. In order for me to be the best artist that I can be, I must fill this gap. While I am always searching for a way to do this, I am constantly finding interest in the connections we make with what we are surrounded by, waste and wasting, industry and industrial materials, nature and natural materials, shapes, colors, purposeful and not so purposeful objects, and other ordinary things. The relations we have and the actions we take with all of these things are general representations of our society, whether problematic or not. By using these subjects and things in my art is how I strive to be socially conscious and relate to our society. I am striving to make work that sends a subtle message to its viewers. Whether that message is sent in the act of making the work of art or whether it is sent in the product will vary from creation to creation. Through being an artist in society, I want to make creative change that effectively bridges the gap between the two parts of myself and the two parts of the world today: its problems and their solutions.

Heather Mullins
My Discourse

As an artist in today’s society, I have realized it is impossible for me to choose only one discourse. In our ever-changing world with my own ever-changing and developing mind, the only way I can see being effective as an artist is by indulging in several discourses. Sculpture is what I have primarily studied for years and what my specific interest is in. However, through sculpture I will be and want to do many things.
I am a builder, constantly building physical contraptions, structures and environments. By this I do not mean that I build traditional sculpture that stands alone in galleries, I have almost no interest in work that is only meant to be looked at from afar. I am interested in what I call manual interaction. My work will not work for you unless you work for it. I am not interested in making kinetic or electronic sculptures if they interact with you when you give them nothing. So much of the technology today is absolutely incredible but it is slowly dumbifying our society. The simple fact that people don’t even memorize phone numbers anymore because of cell phones is one example of this. Therefore, I am always building something that requires interaction from the viewer: dispensers, structures to go inside of or climb up. Through the discourse of manual interaction I want my work to create a conversation of play. I want the viewer to have a physically engaging experience with my work or take a physical object away from my work. This could be as little as an apple or a piece of candy or as much as climbing in or up a structure. Play is something that has been a constant in my work for many years now. I want to create places of play for the public: Playgrounds and simple structures to interact with. These places of play lead me to discuss the discourse of materials. The materials I choose to use combined with my intuition are the driving force of what I make. By using what I consider to be politically smart materials, things that would otherwise be thrown away, to create playful environments or manually interactive objects, I can be effective as an artist in today’s world. By combining these discourses of sculpture, manual interaction, play, and materials, I can create engaging art used to facilitate social awareness and creative change for those surrounding me in each setting I may be in.

Here is some of my work at the time of my crit. I made an apple dispenser and ate lots of apples and resolved the tall house-like structure, it's not done yet but at a point of resolution.





I made it through my first semester of grad school. The thought of that sounds crazy to me because I feel like I only started yesterday. However, if I think of everything that I have learned and made it seems a lot longer. At first I was completely overwhelmed by all the intellectual people at the school and the fact that we were being forced by default to analyze and then verbalize what we were making. Now, it may still be overwhelming sometimes but I realized that I wasn't letting my process go free and that was why I was struggling so much. Every piece of successful art I have ever made is because I let my intuition run the process and my work becomes what it is because of what happens intuitively when I'm making it. So, I need to combine the intuition and free process with being a little more deliberate about why I choose the materials I use, what I make etc. but not allow myself to feel too controlled. This is the challenge.

I'm off the the mountains for a month...can't wait! Happy Holidays to anyone who reads this!