Amanda’s Shell

In my second year of university, I took a Character Design class taught by the incredible sculptor and animator James Stewart (www.jamesstewartsculpture.com).

We spent the first week sculpting a live nude model called Amanda. The second week, we were asked to create an abstract sculpture of Amanda, honing in on the most crucial features of her shape.

I decided to focus on the one hand on her hip, keep most of the weight on the left leg and maintain a distinct head from the body. I also used the strokes my fingers left in the clay to emphasise her shoulder blades, legs and nose.

But the other thing that struck me was that, after a week of sculpting Amanda’s body - measuring every inch of it even - we had come to know very little about Amanda. We knew she took this gig to make money to continue her travels, we knew she had a dog that she enjoyed hiking with, and we knew she wen’t mushroom picking. That’s it. After a week of staring at her naked body.

So, I chose to not only reduce her down to her simplest physical shape, but also to incorporate the role she had played in our class in its simplest terms: she was a shell of a person.