Blind Sculpture Garden
The Blind Sculpture Garden explores the act of sculpting without the sense of sight. A sculpture garden space is designated with a plastic sheet. Blank mounds of clay are placed throughout this designated space with the largest mound placed in the center. Sculptors are blindfolded and enter the space to together. They feel for mounds of clay to transform through touch, when they are finished transforming a blank mound they move on blindly searching for the next mound. After experiencing blind sculpting on their own, the sculptors find each other at the largest blank mound in the center of the garden. Here all sculptors work as one sculpting the center piece of the garden together, not as separate hands but attempting to transform the clay as one common body. When they find an end to this final community sculpture, the blind sculpture garden is complete.
This experience should be highly meditative. Participants are guided by a sensual experience of space and transformation. Their work in the Blind Sculpture Garden is liminal and fleeting. What they create can so easily be transformed by new blind hands searching for a fresh mound to work with. The products generated through the Blind Sculpture Garden are of far less importance than the physical and mental experience of the sculptors. Can they feel themselves disappearing into the sensual life of touch? Can they feel themselves as one body manipulating a garden of blank clay whether working together or separately? Who is sculpting...hands, imagination, or the clay itself informing the body?
