During meeting with Brendan this week (week12), Sarah and I had more sanding to do. Brendan had made 7 cloud structures that he would like us to sand them. Here I attached a few photos of our progress and the tools we used. The grey areas you find in each connecting joints were glue residues, which we wanted to get rid of by sanding. The outsides were way easier than the insides as we can use large tool, like sand paper stapled on wood piece. For those small angled, inside joints, it was not enough space for a wood piece to come through, so we had to hand held sand paper to make them smooth. Also, as you may tell from our selfie, we had to wear masks the whole time because sanding can make the studio pretty dusty.

In my previous blog posts, I had also mention about sanding so basically I had been doing it for a few weeks. Honestly, it was tiring. Especially when I flipped the cloud structure and thought I was all done with one side, but when I finished the other side and went back to the original, I asked myself did I even sand this. Because sanding was more of a physical work, I think it gave me more insights towards being an artist: it is not just about idea. Even though your audience may not know all the hard work and physical efforts you put in the creating process, it is an attitude or faith that artists need to have, to be a perfectionist as much as possible. In other word, at the stage of coming up with idea, the role is an artist; whereas at the stage of constructing, the role changes to a technician.

The reading discussion we had on Monday actually connects perfectly with my thoughts above. We were discussing about immaterial labor and material labor. Life of being an artist needs lots of risk taking, because the value of immaterial labor is not presumable and never guaranteed. You may or may not get something out of your artwork. However, this is not always the case as artists who have fame already tend to have a more guaranteed careers. It is also interesting that Steven brought up the idea of Foucault’s panoptic prison. Artists usually have their life and work mixed up, which is similar with being in a panoptic prison that they are being watched by potential eyes all the time. This mix up of work and life is in fact overwhelming to me (despite I kind of feel I am already doing it) because there is always pressure of being watched so you need to regulate yourself constantly, and this makes having a complete rest impossible.