Elisha Hall, 19
What I Do
I didn't have a sculpture space 'cause I'm an art-education student taking sculpture classes. And I don't like carrying stuff to class 'cause I think sculpture's bulky. So I figured my friends can walk themselves to class, and I can paint them, and they could look like sculptures. The title of the piece was "I Don't Have a Sculpture Space" because I didn't have a place to, like, work on anything like handblown or crafty.
For the actual in-class presentation, we did that on Broad Street. At first I was kinda like, "I'm in my bra and underwear on Broad Street," but then it's weird because when you're painted you don't feel as naked. It's really weird you feel like you have tons of clothes on.
So we stood like statues for a while, and then we just wanted to be normal people 'cause we were people, but we were being sculptures. So, we all sat around and took a little break and smoked cigarettes.
The response was great. Everyone that walked by loved it, and, like, my sculpture class loved it. They thought it was great because I didn't have a sculpture space, and I couldn't work on it. They thought it was an excellent problem-solving thing. They liked the fact that we were standing around when we were taking a break. And we were like, smoking and stuff, being natural even though we were painted completely gray.
About two weeks earlier, me and seven or eight of my friends went out [to the Lee Monument], and I painted all of them. And they all stood on the Lee Monument, and I got 30-some pictures of them. And that was the first part of the sculpture critique [my class] looked at the pictures. Then they came outside and saw us and got to see the real thing, even though it was on a smaller scale.
I really like people. I really like the human form. I'm a painter, but that was my way of doing my painting you know, making it sculpture.