A Total Bust: Why my best assessment was a smashed sculpture.

As a student at a small college, I had already taken every 3-dimensional sculptural class the college offered and yet I was still desperate to learn more and grow into the field of figurative sculpture. Luckily, a professor, Taylor,  was willing to take on my wild dreams and naivete and support my journey with an independent study course. With a recommendation from another professor to study a master sculptor, Phillipe Faraut, I used videos and books for the technical anatomical content while Taylor facilitated the actual learning environment.

The process for sculpting a basic figurative bust was meticulous. It started with a loose representation of a skeleton, then with muscle groups layered one by one before completing the figure with a final layer of “skin” softening out the underlying structures.

Having only just started the semester, I spent hours upon hours with anatomy books and videos, slowly studying each structure and how it connects to the others, eventually arriving with an artwork I was truly proud to present to Taylor the next day. 

After discussing my process, Taylor calmly reached out with a flat hand. While still casually leaning one elbow on the standing height steel table, she compressed the wet clay into a crumbled lump. It was a dramatic gesture, clearly a memorable moment, accompanied by a piece of advice I still remind myself of today – yet still struggle to implement. 

“You made it once, you can make it again. And the next one will be better.”

This is my impression of that slow squash.

Shocked and speechless, I listened as she explained that you have to learn through repetition and refuse to be afraid that the next sculpture might be worse than the last. She could tell I was way too attached to this creation. It was better than anything I had created up until that point! With a smashed lump of clay, I had to let it go, try again, and learn to trust myself in the process. 

I dusted off my clay-coated reference materials and followed the process over again: block out the skeleton, layer in the muscle groups, wrap with skin. I remade the bust in an astonishing speed compared to my laborious first try. Taylor had been quietly watching from afar as she moseyed around the room helping other students. When she retired to review my “second draft,” she instructed me to to destroy it!

For those who have not yet experienced it, intentionally destroying your own artwork is profoundly liberating. 

I might not have had this level of enthusiasm until the “third draft”…

Perhaps Taylor was checking to make sure I actually knew how to create the bust on my own (even with reference material in hand), but more importantly, her assessment of my process caught a crucial flaw that was preventing me from further growth. I needed to learn how to learn as a self-directed learner and artist. I had to develop my own resilience, iterative practice, and self-assessment skills. 

Through this experience, I slowly began to learn that there are two major barriers that treating an artwork as too precious can cause:

1. It is better to focus on iteration and experimentation over a single artefact – especially early in the learning process. Perfectionism is a barrier to learning because truly learning anatomy to the point of muscle memory can only be achieved through repetition. While perfectionism plagues me today, the experience revealed to me that practice makes perfect learning effective.
2. Feedback is only as effective as your ability to listen to it and implement it. When a creation is too precious, critique can feel like a personal attack, but by letting the emotional attachment go, the artefact remains an independent object that can be viewed as separate from self worth. Emotional attachment to an artefact hinders the ability to critically self-assess in the pursuit of improvement. 

Assessing anatomical accuracy might not have been Taylor’s primary expertise, but effective teaching is a distinct skillset that she exercised with grace and humor. She knew I was not ready to hear harsh criticism as I was just developing my confidence and had a lengthy learning journey ahead. She gamified the repetitive process of recreating over and over through challenges such as time restrictions, different poses, half scale, or other size differences. This helped teach not just in a motivating and confidence building manner, but also helped me to learn strategies for learning independently, echoing many of the ideas of self-directed learning (Knowles, 1975). Through dismembering the clay bust, she helped me to dismantle the psychological barriers that kept me comfortable but stagnant, and to build the strategies to learn independently for the future. 

Effective assessment for learning supports the learning process and must include dynamic practices, continuous feedback, and actively foster self-evaluation (Shepard, 2000). Taylor was well-versed in leveraging the zone of proximal development while expertly delivering feedback that kept me challenged, motivated, and confident. She was skilled in the art of gentle, guiding feedback that balanced motivation and self-confidence with corrective feedback. Perhaps the best way to build a student up is to teach them how to tear their work down. 

References

Knowles, M. S. (1975). Self-directed learning: A guide for learners and teachers. Cambridge, The Adult Education Co.. 

Shepard, L. A. (2000). The role of assessment in a learning culture. Educational Researcher, 29 (7), 4-14. A

Image Credits

Author created meme using template “My-Precious-Gollum” on ImgFlip. https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/30137861/My-precious-Gollum

Canadian Broadcasting Company. (2020). Schitt’s Creek Comedy GIF by CBC [Animated gif]. Giphy. https://giphy.com/gifs/cbc-schitts-creek-URkVaXX4cubqCxLYma

Moriarty, J. (2014). Figurative clay sculpture 1 [Photograph].

Moriarty, J. (2014). Figurative clay sculpture 2 [Photograph].

No author. (2016). Hydraulic press crushing rubber duck [Animated gif]. https://giphy.com/gifs/press-rubber-squished-9wIMQtSaKjoaI