Project 05: Memento & Project 06: Wall Piece

The Forgotten Halls and The Empty

I chose to include these two together, since both have fairly similar design origins (memories). 

The first, the black monster oozing between two small pieces of wood, serves as the memento. Crafted using clay, wood and black spray paint, the piece highlights the terrifying memory in my childhood when I would see ghastly visages appear down my hallway, forever approaching, but never reaching their destination. Though the figures had no physical attributes and were wispy, humanoid forms, I chose this more abstract representation to create a physically disturbing looking and feeling piece, to capture my fear and discomfort.

The second is a memory of a room in my grandfather's house. Hand-made, lived-in for many years, but now abandoned, it was necessary to craft it using bare wood, with hints of color reflect the life that once filled the space. It loosely mimics that lonely room and serves as a constant reminder of what was and what will never be again.

Project 04: Fluxus Box

The Hungering Maw

When presented with the challenge of creating a Fluxus Box inspired by a movie of our choosing, my mind instantly went to the most infamous pirate films to ever hit Hollywood -- The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. I wanted to create a box out of clay which mimicked the bottom of the ocean, inspired by the film's most popular antagonist, Davy Jones, who wandered the deep as a horrid monster transformed by the sea and the curse of the Flying Dutchman.

As with Davy Jones, however, the design for the box shifted to be more monstrous than merely the bottom of the sea. Adding a giant orange eye, and a few sharp teeth which hung outside the maw of the chest, it truly became something mythological, something that looked appropriate in the films. Despite much trouble in actually crafting the box (requiring two complete start-overs), the end product was indisputably magnificent.

The Items for the Fluxus Box:

• Bound Dead Flowers - representative of the love between Elizabeth Swann and William Turner (protagonists of the film) as well as the now dead love between Davy Jones and Calypso, the sea goddess. Meant to symbolize the hardship of love and the inseparable bond and pain that comes with said bond at times.
• The Green Ring - a ring bound in rope and dyed green. This symbolizes the promise of marriage of Will to Elizabeth, but more so his eventual marriage to his duty aboard the Flying Dutchman. A physical symbol of bondage to the sea covering that to his wife.
• Wooden Knot - a wooden circle with a metal loop tied around it before further rope. Symbolic of the bond that Will makes to his father to free him from his servitude to Davy Jones, promising to pierce the heart of Davy Jones, but ironically, it is Will who has his heart stabbed by the devil of the sea. Representative of broken hope.
• Submerged Crushed Shells - a small container filled with water, with white paint dried on the inside and tiny chunks of shell within it. This symbolizes the betrayal and broken heart of Davy Jones by Calypso. Pain and betrayal now forever curse the Dutchman and its crew as its captain hopelessly tries to drown out his suffering.
• Green Rope - the symbolic binding of life and death throughout the film.

Extra Pictures:

Project 03: Balsa Wood Sculptures

Steve and The Ruins

 

Sculpture dubbed Steve as he started to take a somewhat animal appearance, similar to either a Chinese Dragon or perhaps Pterodactyl. His wife just left him, please send him your condolences.

The third project was where things got fairly more free-form, where we were challenged to create two unique sculptures that captured one of seven principles of art and design.

The first to emerge is a piece I call "The Ruins" which had many small, complicated parts and made use of masking tape, wood glue, and balsa wood. It eventually ended up resembling something chaotic and destructive, as that is how it received its name, and made excellent use of both negative and positive space, which made it interesting in composition and form. It was spray-painted black and white to further bull out these intense spaces.

The second piece started out as a use of balance, as pieces larger than those below it balanced carefully on strange angles to create a somewhat creature-like character. I kind of went with it at that point, and made the creature into something of both balance and the lack of balance. Eventually, he was dubbed Steve and has received an intense backstory as an accountant, pirate and heart surgeon. Overall, however, he was made to symbolize balance.

Extra Pictures:

Project 02: Soap Carving Animals

Viktor The Hippopotamus

Viktor and the original model side-by-side.

The second project of the semester was similar in difficulty to its predecessor, the masking tape shoes, but rather than building something outwards from nothing -- we'd instead be carving away from something to make something else. When presented with the challenge of replicating an animal out of soap, the hippopotamus came to mind, knowing that it would be somewhat easy to replicate with its smooth skin and amphibious habits. And so, Viktor was born, alongside his poor disfigured brother Pinn.

The main issue I encountered was that the soap I had chosen was far too short for the snout of the hippo, which forced me to try multiple methods to extend the soap past its physical barriers. The result on Viktor was very successful, while his brother suffered from constant crumbling face disorder. As such, the red soap hippo's face lacks the details presented in the white soap and was held together primarily using pins (hence the nickname, Pinn). Overall, a very challenging project that tests patience (as it does take a long time to carve and rushing may ruin your animal completely) and provides the student with a unique skill of relief carving from life models.

Project 01: Masking Tape Shoes

A Challenge of Endurance

The start of the semester was met with the constantly frustrating task of recreating a pair of shoes out of masking tape -- which, at first glance, seemed straightforward enough, but turned out to be far more complicated than anticipated. Layer after layer of tape would rip the sanity from my mind, as replicating the forms and structure of the shoes would take days to build up, ensuring that the pieces were solid and yet malleable, somewhat like a shoe itself.

After weeks of working, however, I finally found a useful tactic that cut down the amount of tape needed, which involved rolling the tap into cylinders to thicken up areas and hold the form more sturdily than the multiple layer method. By far the most infuriating and confusing project of the semester, providing challenge after challenge.

Reading Project #2

"A few people get violently claustrophobic and start screaming," - Diane Ackerman on the touch rooms, page 97

For the second piece, I went with straight up photography (with some slight adjustments in Photoshop) and placed a humanoid figure, which had a screaming expression in the dark depths of my room. Whilst it is just vague enough to make out the face slightly askance, it is primarily a dark photo. It is meant to symbolize those which lose their senses and consciousness in the darkened halls of sensory stimulation. Whilst it is a somewhat tame representation compared to actually experiencing someone screaming across a vast, inky, abyss of a room, it still retains a somewhat creepy atmosphere and is meant to inspire just some manner of discomfort. In hindsight, I wish there was more background space to make this haunting visage even more hidden and frightening.

Reading Project #1: Stamping on Butterflies

"We lifted them from the net one at a time to check their health and sex and to see if they were pregnant, and then glued a small postage-stamp-like tag to the top of a wing." - Diane Ackerman, page 94

This first piece was inspired by the simple idea of stamping a butterfly like an envelope, as the writer so compared the tracker devices used in the field on actual butterflies. I created some simple cutouts of the insects from yellow envelops, leaving the metal tongs to imitate a head and antennae, and by placing a small stamp in the upper corner of the wing. The color scheme was inspired by the mention of cold temperatures which briefly followed the quote (namely the background) and the mention of sex and pregnancy which brings to mind very bright, vibrant colors, such as pink. The background is essentially a close up of some clothes and blankets I had lying in a pile with a photocopy effect applied on top of it. It overall is meant to be a playful take on the actual events whilst also recreating something biological from a mere handful of materials.