Cheol Jung

December 3, 2011                 Scary Summer Sculpture Class (SSSC)                                                    

                  I am currently majoring in Visual Arts at a University in New Jersey.  I chose my major because my parents recognized that I had a talent for art when I was in elementary school.  At that time, I was living in South Korea and later, during my high school years, they sent me to art academies. 

                  I became interested in moving to the United States because my parents sent my older brother there first. After I arrived, I made many good friends. One of them suggested the university that I currently go to. It was then, that I was able to apply and was accepted at my current university. It is a good experience to go to a university in the United States because I have met people from all over the world, and I have learned about many different cultures. It has also given me an opportunity to practice and study English.

                   In June 2011, my university gave me an opportunity to take a sculpture class for the first time in my life. I was very excited to explore a new side of art. There were three projects that were supposed to be completed during this summer course. One was working with clay and plaster, the second was wood- cutting, and the third was steel-welding.  I found working with wood and welding steel very dangerous because I used a tool similar to a chain saw that could have possibly cut my fingers off!  Working with clay was fun, but quite boring because it was not new to me.  I used to work with it a lot in my art academies in South Korea.  Wood-cutting and steel-welding were very interesting for me because I never used these techniques in art before, but they were quite dangerous and very noisy.

                  At the end of the summer, I completed these three projects.  For my clay project, I imprinted a waffle-shape into the clay, and used many kitchen appliances to create different designs on the clay. For the wood-working project, I made something similar to a satellite dish that you would see outside peoples’ houses or apartments for television. I was given many fragments of wood to make a design. I started out with making the letter “X”, and I put the circle wood fragment on top of the “X” hoping to balance out the design. I originally wanted to paint the bottom wood black, and have the circle painted white. I did not have time to paint the bottom black, and so this was the final design.  The steel-welding project was very difficult. I had many ideas, but I wanted my project to look like a music note at the end. However, my professor says it looks like a flower wilting. I decided to try to make it look more like an octopus, by stretching the legs out further, but I did not have enough material to make eight legs. My teacher suggested I work with chain at the top, but the heaviness of the chain makes the bottom not able to support it. That’s why the ball droops. I wanted to use colors from a piano, such as gold, black and white. The Home Depot did not have all the colors I needed for my design; therefore, as you will see, I have bright yellow, white, black and green chains supporting the structure.

                  Of all three projects, my favorite is the wood-cutting satellite dish.  Although, I did not intend for it to look like a satellite dish, the project looks balanced and came together well. This project was also the one I got the highest grade for because of its complexity and stability. I hope to take another sculpture class in the near future to practice my skills with wood-working and steel-welding again. In the future, I will draw my design and have it approved by my professor before I start creating the project by hand. I hope that I will learn from my past mistakes and will be able to further my creativity.

Clay