Diorama Sculpture
What Is Diorama Sculpture?
Dioramas traditionally render historic or naturalistic scenes in three dimensions to elicit an experience in the viewer of witnessing a live event. Natural history museums use dioramas to display taxidermized animals in their typical habitat or humans in possible scenes of anthropological development. Some dioramas are displayed fully in the round, but more typically they are installed in cabinets fully enclosed on five sides with one side left as a window for the viewer.
Dioramas as an artistic form, that is freed from adherence to actual or possible history, are a subset of “box sculptures.” The box sculpture format allows artists to create an enclosed three-dimensional world. The results often have a more physical presence than typical two-dimensional works, but they also tend to be more fragile and complicated to store and maintain. The surrealist artist Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) was one of the most famous and successful artists to utilize the box format. In the surrealist tradition, Cornell’s boxes could be viewed as “scenes”, but rarely bore furnishings or details reflecting any actual place or event. The worlds he created suggested dreams and thoughts uncoupled from lived reality, and so Cornell’s boxes would not fall under the category of “dioramas”.
Understanding Diorama Sculptures
A diorama sculpture is scaled. Its elements’ relation to each other maintain the relative sizes of similar elements seen or imagined in our world. Some artists combine miniatures with actual human scale elements, but these sculptures are still viewed from the perspective of the miniatures. The miniatures set the scale, and we are giants.
Dioramas are immersive. The point of a diorama is to render a scene that a viewer feels they could enter. Fully sculpted dioramas evoke a more sensual artistic experience than most two dimensional renditions. A painting or drawing creates a window through which a viewer sees. Dioramas, even when viewed through a glass window, suggest a live environment.
Dioramas are a retrograde format. They require time and patience to construct while accurate drawing or computer graphic technology can achieve similar effects in forms that are more easily displayed and archived. I make dioramas because I enjoy the tactile experience of crafting the elements, and I enjoy the experience of viewing the finished products. The richness of the fully sculpted forms engages me.
What Are Dioramas?
Dioramas are sculptural environments that usually imply or include a representation of an animate character in the environment. While some dioramas display a static scene only, many dioramas include a subject in that scene. Dioramas in history museums place historic subjects in historic scenes.
Museum dioramas have a specific narrative function: they present an understanding of a subject’s place and time, but artistic dioramas take advantage of the enclosed spaces created by the format to present pieces of worlds actual or imagined. The dimensionality invites viewers into a space entirely within the artists’ control which may or may not resemble our lived experience.
Key Features of Diorama Sculptures
Diorama sculptures present objects in an imagined space and simultaneously present the environmental context of those objects. Most two-dimensional works use backgrounds to highlight the subject, and traditional object sculpture has no background other than the space the object is placed within. In dioramas, the environment of the diorama is this subject. Dioramas present spaces as much as things.
Flat images layered in a box format would probably fall into the category of “shadow boxes” rather than dioramas, but dioramas often incorporate painted or drawn imagery, especially along the sides to depict the scene extending beyond the bounds of the enclosure. However, to create the sense of being able to physically enter a scene, most of the elements should be fully modelled in the round.
Whether life-size or miniature, fully modeled dioramas reward observers’ shifting viewing directions, since fully rounded sculptures can be viewed from multiple angles. Dioramas are explored more than simply viewed.
While there are no specific materials commonly used to create dioramas, many dioramas differ in the extent that they use mass-produced elements, such as dollhouse furniture or purchased figures, versus hand crafted elements. While crafting elements from base materials, such as wood, metal, or clay, can be time consuming, a patient craftsperson can create a scene with fully controlled consistency, and the effect can heighten the sense of otherworldly realism. Mass produced elements often bear the traces of origin and so contribute to the “dollhouse” or toy-like effect of the product..
How Diorama Sculptures Differ from Traditional Exhibits
Artistic diorama sculptures tend to be smaller scale. Life-size sculptural scenes are usually labelled “installations”. Contemporary art often utilizes large scale or simply large size. This may be in part an effort to stand out in the plethora of artwork being created. What sculptural dioramas lack in size they often make up for in detail.
Two dimensioned artworks are viewed from any angle, but dioramas require moving and refocusing the eyes to experience all the details. Traditional object sculpture could be viewed in the round, but diorama sculptures are conceptually entered. Explorers of dioramas sometimes feel themselves entering the created environment.
Diorama Sculptures Through Time
The ancient Egyptian tomb of Meketre, a royal chief steward, contained a granary diorama dating to about 1980 B.C. complete with figures engaged in various activities in an enclosed space. Architectural models with and without figures have been produced by cultures all over the world for centuries. While depicting people and our world in two dimensions appears to better survive the ravages of time and occupies most of the historic record, humans have also wanted to render our world in three dimensions at scale all along.
Dioramas as popular attractions appear to have been started in the 18th century with painted life-scale scenes in which audiences could experience sensations of movement or the passage to time through lighting changes or by literally moving the rolled up painted image across a stage by unrolling it at one end and rolling it up on the other. The classic diorama that we see in museums appears to have been initiated by the Parisian Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1789–1851), of daguerreotype fame, who used secretly developed painting techniques and real world objects to recreate actual places that appeared to change with changes in light.
With the advent of improved taxidermic techniques and support of museums, craftspeople created elaborate dioramas of wildlife enabling urban museumgoers to observe seemingly wild species in their native habitats, and for many years these were popular and widely developed.
The Making of a Diorama Sculpture
Creating a diorama intended to represent an actual place or time requires researching that place and time and selecting the elements to represent it. The craftsperson should understand why the particular scene appeals to her and arrange the diorama in a way that conveys that appeal to the viewer.
Artists who work in the diorama format are not necessarily recreating a specific place or time. With enough detail and skill, an artist can draw guests into her created world and momentarily suspend disbelief.
Artistic dioramas are as diverse as artwork in any other format, but to generalize broadly, the subject of an artistic diorama is reflected in the atmosphere it creates rather than its specific scene. Because a diorama creates an enclosed space, even dioramas outside of the five-sided box create a space in themselves, that space conveys the feeling and intent of the artist. When an artist decides to create a diorama, formal considerations of scale, density of detail and the combination of graphic and sculpted elements are all balanced in the service of creating the proper atmospheric environment.
Some Leading Diorama Sculpture Artists
Many skillful artists utilize the diorama format these days, and I have no pretention of representing the best of them here. However, the following are some of the more compelling examples of diorama sculpture I’ve seen recently.
Mr. Doyle makes his home in New York’s Hudson Valley region, and as resident of New York City, I am fond of the Hudson Valley. Mr. Doyle’s diorama sculptures take advantage of the consistent scale of the format to create scenes combining wildly disparate elements. His “Proxy Series” depicts clean, if sometimes broken, suburban houses next to soldiers engaged in trench warfare or houses perched on columns of dirt above soldiers marching past piles of debris. In his “Clear History” series, statues monumentalizing common internet procedure such as “Switch Profile” stand cracked and decaying next to wandering visitors. Mr. Doyle’s approach places mundane architecture and activity next to tragic implications.
Some diorama artists prefer to photograph their sculptures and then display the photographs. This strategy markets less expensive artwork (photographs) and simplifies transport. The team Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber create dioramas of places seemingly real and obviously imagined, and then take photographs filled with the diorama. While the photograph doesn’t have the full three-dimensional effect of the actual diorama, the sense of a world through the window remains. Most of these dioramas do not appear to include human-resembling figures, but the imprint of humans on the Earth is a predominant subject. The atmosphere of loneliness, desolation, and irony pervades their scenes.
Architect and artist Peter Feigenbaum creates dioramas of decaying urban buildings and places them in an urban setting and photographs them so that the actual buildings in the background seamlessly blend into his fabricated buildings in the foreground. While Doyle and Nix and Gerber reveal some anxiety about aspects of modern society in their art, Feigenbaum explores his fascination with urban architecture and settings without commentary other than his choice of subjects. He claims that his dioramas are not based on actual buildings, but their craft and detail appear completely realistic in the photographs.
My own diorama sculptures incorporate some recognizable details, such as garden tools or computers, but my emphasis is on the figures occupying an environment, and the combination of the two expresses my hope for humanity. In the “Dualities Made Whole” series I began with commercial packaging, such as cereal or laundry detergent boxes, and fit diorama scenes inside them. The intent was to contrast cooperative living environments with commodification and implying that each had elements of the other. My dioramas tend to have sculptural outsides and diorama insides, which to some extent blends human scale with the miniature scale of the dioramas.
Charlie R. Olson, Duality #2 (front view)
Conclusion
People working in the diorama format must have an eye for detail and a love of working materials with their hands. While most of us also work in other formats, the diorama format seems most appropriate for conveying our inner experience of the outer world.
People have referred to my work as my “toys” and my “little thingies”. There is a toylike dimension to diorama sculptures, but the format also offers an opportunity to capture attention and transport a viewer to a completely different space, and that momentary sense of dislocation is one of the reasons I keep making diorama sculptures.