The work of Malcolm McClay’s advanced sculpture class is different from other sculptures – it moves. The associate professor’s kinetic sculpture class presented its work Thursday afternoon from the semester in the Art and Design Building. The class called its presentation “Nuts and Bolts: A Motion Extravaganza.” The extravaganza featured about a dozen sculptures the class worked on during the year. McClay said a major part of the class is watching videos and figuring out how things work. For the first 90 minutes of each six hour class period, students watched YouTube.com videos of other kinetic sculptures from around the world. McClay said he freezes each video, and the class discusses the mechanics involved in each project. By using YouTube, McClay said his class is able to become part of a larger, worldwide community. “There’s not much kinetic sculpture in Baton Rouge,” McClay said. “We pull work from all over the world.” The class has been posting videos of their work on YouTube during the semester. McClay plans to upload videos of the final projects soon. “It becomes a large classroom that makes everyone’s work freely available to everyone else,” McClay said. McClay said the students’ work developed through three projects. In the first project, students developed sculptures made of wood with hand cranks. In the second project, students used simple electrical motors. McClay gave each student the motor and necessary hardware. He asked the students to see how many movements they could get out of the simple hardware. For the final project, McClay gave his students a choice. They could use electrical or pneumatic power. Final projects included a crawling Teddy bear, a pneumatic exploding trash can and a walking television with Pac Man characters rotating around the screen. McClay said the key is to feed students the information piece by piece. The projects started simple and got more complex as the semester progressed. “I really liked this class,” said Claire Smith, sculpture senior. “None of us had ever done anything like this before.” Smith said the class is relatively new, and the students’ work exceeded her expectations. “Even though the class is for advanced sculpture students, it was the first time most of them had worked with movement or robotics,” McClay said. All the sculptures were made in the on-campus wood shops and metal shops. Evan Trapp, sculpture senior, said he loves doing this kind of work because of the problem solving involved. For his final project, Trapp made a sea-saw style boat he called “ride the wave.” He said it took him about three weeks to complete the project. McClay said he developed the class over the past few years to stress the basic principles of movement in sculpture.
—-Contact Jack LeBlanc at [email protected]