Casting the Body & the Everyday
with Soo Shin
SCULPTURE 690 001 | 3 credits | $250 lab fee
August 10–23, 2025
In this introductory course, students will obtain technical skills and a fundamental understanding of mold-making. Using the techniques learned in class, students will experiment with various ways to capture the everyday and the body while examining personal symbolism, rituals, and the border between art and daily life. Students will practice imprint, ready-made object, and body casting through four exercise projects using clay, plaster, slip, alginate, silicone, and resin. The class will look into art movements in history, such as Arte Povera, Neo-Dada, and Fluxus, via lectures to find the lineage of the everyday in visual art. We will discuss the practices of artists such as Ian Breakwell, Sarah Lucas, Gabriel Orozco, David Altmejd, Liz Magor, Cornelia Parker, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and many others, to consider various possibilities of materials, objects, and rituals to trace the everyday. Readings will include Joseph Kosuth’s, “Art After Philosophy and Selected Writings, 1966-1990 (Part II: Theory as Praxis: A Role for an ‘Anthropologized Art’)”, MIT Press. Students will develop their final project using one of the four exercise techniques. Students are encouraged to adopt the natural environment of the Ox-Bow campus as their new everyday and explore it as the source of pattern materials for their molds. Assignments will include inviting students to consider sculpture as a means of recording, creating a new daily routine that involves Ox-Bow's surroundings. Using imprints of materials and traces from it they will cast the imprints into several plaster blocks. Students will also cast a body part in a symbolic gesture. Incorporating found materials, objects, or sites of your choice with your work to create five sculptures or installations as a final project.
Soo Shin, here, 2021, cast iron and brass
Soo Shin (she/her; b. Seoul, South Korea) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago. Shin employs a diverse range of materials—ceramic, brass, concrete, wood, and seawater—to evoke themes of connection, spatial displacement, and longing. She is the recipient of the fellowship at Djerassi Artist Residency, Woodside, California; the individual artist grant at the Illinois Arts Council; and the Vilcek Foundation fellowship at MacDowell Artist Residency. Shin’s work has been presented at The Luminary, St. Louis, Missouri; PATRON Gallery, Chicago; Goldfinch Gallery, Chicago; Chicago Manual Style, Chicago; LVL3, Chicago, IL; and Chicago Artist Coalition, among others. She has completed residencies at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; Vermont Studio Center; Art Farm, Marquette, Nebraska; and Ox-Bow School of Art & Artist Residency, Saugatuck, Michigan. She earned a Master’s in Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a Master’s in Fine Arts, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea.