About project
Let me tell you about my project. My name is Jarosław (Jarek) Solecki. You are viewing my visual blog. It has been created to document the process of learning and creative while completing activities of the Developing Your Creative Practice (DYCP) | Arts Council England grant programme (Sculpting in 3D DYCP-00349467-R8). Here I present a series of selected artworks that were created as a result of the project. These works are intended to demonstrate the problems and challenges I faced during my work as a 3D sculptor.
Where did the idea come from
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed to us that we need to prepare for periods when contact with other people will only be possible in a digital world.
The “transfer” of paintings to the 3D gallery and merging them with a digital code can be an answer to the need to participate with art in periods of ‘lockdown’. Having experience with virtual projects in collaboration with other artists, I decided to take the challenge and take it one step further. I have made an effort to start work on implementing virtual sculptures in 3D space.
My taking on such a challenge was no coincidence. I have many years of experience in carving and sculpting in stone. This type of work seems to be incapable of being translated into virtual activity. However, I wanted to bring out a specific artistic spatial imagination and the ability to imagine each creative stage, including the curatorial perspective.
Sculpting in a virtual environment can be a way of achieving greater creative freedom and lowering its costs. It does not take a spacious studio, a cumbersome processing, energy-intensive processes, dangerous tools and huge resources to move around in digital space, to research and shape it as a creational matter. All it takes is artistic skills combined with coding, good computer hardware, software and …a lot of patience in learning new working tools.
Outcome
By learning 3D sculpting and modeling with Blender, I significantly developed my existing skills as a sculptor and my IT knowledge. My work quickly evolved into a practice of thinking and shaping virtual objects as inseparable elements of a virtual artworld. Ready-made everyday objects, scanned by me with my smartphone, became an incentive for sculptural experiments. At the same time, I was looking for an opportunity to present my work and, in a later perspective, also the work of other artists. Thinking about easy and free access to art, I looked at ways to display 3D objects in web browsers without having to install additional software. I chose WebGL technology for this, expanding my Javascript programming skills in parallel to learning how to operate the new sculpting tools. I began to explore the problems of an interface that allows us to get an insight into virtual objects and spaces. In the search for unconventional artistic and exhibition methods, the design thinking course has been extremely useful. From the UX course I learned how crucial it is to understand the importance of the 3D art audience in the process of designing virtual artworks. Artists should consider this audience as users of an application that provides them with the opportunity to interact with 3D art-objects. For me, the problem of presenting art objects has become a part of the creative process, opening up a new field of experimental art. Thinking about virtual environments for sculpting, exhibiting and acquiring art as a place for a collaborative creative process is one of the greatest discoveries for me and a source of my motivation to continue working on such issues.
By juxtaposing my previous experience as a sculptor with the creation of 3D objects, I found out how similar these processes are. Although sculpting with code has a different specificity, it involves a similar art of imitation. The very form we can observe on the PC screen can be a perfect imitation of the real object.
A full visual and theoretical summary of the project will be presented during my solo exhibition: “Dystopia of the Imitation” at the Blue Point Art Gallery London in March 2022. The exhibition will be followed by an ebook.
Relevant to my project: research and development time to explore, artistic practice and take risks, professional development, activities, creating new work, building new networks for future development, presentation of work
About me
The main focus of my artistic and creative activity are: sculpture mainly in stone; performing art in public space; socially engaged art [social exclusion]; a virtual environment; possibilities of combining new technologies and art with visual communication in public space.
I created large format sculptures in various types of stone. I also work on projects at the intersection of critical art and cultural anthropology. Those projects implemented art in public life. One of my early works combining new media with art and social sciences was “Palimpsest Maps” [Urban Legend — Art Festival in Public Space in Poznan]. The project used digital technologies to create a virtual walk around the historical district of Poznan [made in “Flash”].
I was also a participant in the art and research project TICASS: Imaging technologies in communication, art and social sciences (Horizon 2020 EU no 734602). My latest project is the virtual Blue Point Art Gallery London, as part of combining new technologies with art.
In 2015 I founded a small charitable Culture Lab Foundation. It initiates and supports innovative solutions in various fields of cultural and social life of the Polish national minority. The Foundation’s main initiatives include research into artistic and literary communication, as well as the marketing of the humanities and the arts.
I am also PHD candidate and a junior researcher in the Contemporary Literary and Artistic Culture Unit of the Institute of European Culture of the Polish University Abroad in London (PUNO).
contact: [email protected]
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