Sculpting Status

This artist confronts her insecurities in her award-winning work

How does Megan experiment with scale?

Megan Baldwin loves to make big sculptures that grab her viewers’ attention and make them think. The largest of the works shown here is 32 inches tall. “When people ask me what it means, I tell them there isn’t one answer,” says Megan, 18. A freshman at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, Megan hopes to someday teach first grade.

What inspired these sculptures?

I wanted to express the insecurities that high school girls carry around and that I was feeling at the time I made these sculptures. In particular, I wanted to focus on beauty and the pressure so many girls feel to look perfect and be who they aren’t in order to build social status.

 

How did you develop your idea?

I researched women’s hairstyles and found a picture of a girl with perfect hair. I wanted to show that you didn’t need to be perfect to be accepted, so I started to create a bust using that perfect hair with imperfect facial features. Each sculpture is a different size and shape to represent that girls can come in different sizes and shapes, and that’s OK.

Megan Baldwin

How did you create your sculptures?

I made all three busts at the same time. Using coils of clay, I worked from the bottom up: first the shoulders, then the necks, the heads, and finally the hair. After building each section, I smoothed the coils and added the next section of coils using wet clay. I built the hair and attached it to the heads. I added the facial features last. I fired the sculptures once, glazed them, and then fired them again.

 

What was most challenging about this process?

Parts of the sculptures kept drying at different rates and cracking. I’d fix a crack on one sculpture only to have a chunk of hair fall off another. It took me more than a year to complete them.

 

Do you have any advice for aspiring artists like yourself?

Trust the process, believe in yourself, and make work that interests you.

Megan won a Gold Medal for her sculpture in the 2018 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards.

To find out more about this program, visit artandwriting.org

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