It's About Time: Student Work

Final Solution:

Changes Made to Bear #2

  I wanted to make changes to my sculpture that functioned on an awareness of what it was a sculpture of.  Because I chose to carve a bear, I wanted to make changes to the sculpture that perhaps a real bear might go through, or that reflect the fact that it is a bear.

Both bears completed.  The green one I chose as the observation bear, and the pink one will be going through the changes. 

Change #1: Exposure to Rain.

     For the first change, I chose to put the bear outside for a couple of days in my garden.  The forecast indicated that in the next one or two days, there should be storms. While outside, the bear also got covered in dirt, just like a real bear would.

The bear outside in the garden, before it rained.

The rain made a change to the bear that was subtle in appearance, causing a few shallow cracks in the surface of the soap and exposing some of the carving marks underneath the top layer, such as the gouge down the bear's back.   Rain also made a difference to the bear's structural integrity, which was noticeable when I initiated the next change.

Cracks in the surface and some carving marks have been revealed

The rain also made the bear even dirtier

Change #2: Leaving a Scent

Bears sometimes rub up against trees to mark their territory.  I rubbed my soap bear against a tree in my front yard, wearing down one side of the bear and leaving a visible, and very heavily scented mark on the tree.  This particular bear marked his territory rather vigorously, and due to the compromise of structural integrity caused by the first change, his leg fell off from the pressure of holding onto him during this change.

He definitely succeeded in using his scent to mark his territory

Bear was a little rough with the tree and lost a foot

       

Change #3: Shedding the Winter Coat

For the third change, I picked up the butter knife I had originally used to carve the bear and shaved off any remaining texture in the top layer, taking into consideration how a bear's fur contributes to his shape and how some of his proportions or his shape might change without his fur.

Quite the haircut

The tummy fur is all gone

Change #4: Visiting a Hot Spring

I tried to make my changes in a chronological order that would make sense in the life of a bear.  I suppose the onset of fall would be a good time for a bear to visit a hot spring (I don't know if they do that or not, but it sounds nice); his winter coat would just be coming back in, but maybe not as quickly as the weather changes.  To simulate this, I partially submerged the bear in a pot of water and brought it to a boil.  He lost a lot of weight in the hot water, and it didn't smell too bad, either.

Bear smells pretty nice

Bear definitely lost some weight in that warm water

Change #5: Feasting

I gathered some flowering weeds from outside near where the bear had been left out in the rain.  I poked holes in his mouth and added the flowers from the weeds.  Since the bear was so hungry, he might have made quite a mess, so I sprinkled him with some of the seeds from the dandelions that had been nearby.

Change #6: Hibernation during Winter

I added some of the soapy water from the "hot spring" to a pan and put the bear in it, and then put it in the freezer for a few hours.  Winter has come.  When I removed the bear from the freezer, he had a slab of soapy, seed-strewn ice attached to his left side.  

Change #7: Exposure to Extreme Heat

If Spring were to be abnormally hot and come a little too early, this bear would have a hard time.  Straight out of the freezer, I put him in the oven.  The ice melted and created a pool of soapy water at the bear's feet, which then boiled into an air-filled, cloud-like structure.  The same thing happened to other parts of the bear that had been wet, including his left side and parts of his right side that the ice water had pooled up on as it melted.  

The white mass around the bear is the cloud-like, air-filled baked soap

Change #8: Colour

This bear has been an albino this whole time.  I discovered earlier, when my mum accidentally spilled hot chocolate on the block of soap I made out of the shavings from the first bear carving, that hot chocolate adhered decently to the soap and showed up as a semi-translucent brown layer.  I'm not sure how well it shows up on the bear as opposed to a large block of soap with a flat, level surface, but it changes the smell of the soap significantly (perhaps not for the better).  

He looks to be in pretty sad shape now.

In Progress Photos of Carvings:

Soap Bear #1:

Bear #1 Finished!

Soap Bear #2:

Momento: Student Work

Final Solution:

     The memory I had that I wanted to portray was moving from my hometown (as much as I have a hometown) of Vancouver to my new permanent (as much as a place is permanent for me) residence of Daytona Beach.  We were on the plane, just before take off, when I spotted a snowflake on the plane window.  I watched it throughout take-off until it finally melted a few thousand feet off the ground.  The image of the snowflake in my mind has become symbolic of that day for me.  

     I used wire, glass, and glue to construct this piece.  I chose the wire not only to act as an armature but also as something that would be sharp, spiky, and somewhat difficult to hold, because a snowflake is difficult to hold, as well.  I chose to purposefully not make the armature even or symmetrical because I didn't want to literally evoke a snowflake.  I also wanted to communicate that although I remember that moment very well in my mind, there is no way I could possibly commit to memory the intricate patterns of that particular snowflake, so I wanted to exaggerate that shortcoming of the human capacity for memory by emphasising the sculpture's imperfection through asymmetry.  I also had a choice of colour for the wire that I used.  I chose this particular wire partially because it seemed more workable but also sturdier than most of my other choices, but I also purposefully chose a warm colour rather than the option of blue, silver, or even purple wire to communicate the tension of a melting snowflake.  Something that represents ice, when it is seen as being cold or being in a cold environment, seems more stable and less ephemeral.  When something cold is seen in a warm environment, we know that it is not going to last.  In this sense, the choice of yellow wire is more meaningful once you understand that the sculpture is representative of the memory of watching a snowflake melt.  

     I chose glass not only because crushed glass looks a lot like ice, but also for the same reason as my choice of wire: because it would be sharp and dangerous-looking and would make the viewer not want to, or maybe not even able to, hold the piece.  The glass was also very difficult to adhere to the wire armature, which makes the piece very fragile.  Again, much like a real snowflake, and much like memories themselves.  

     I originally intended for the glue to be more visible than it ended up being, because I wanted the sculptural snowflake to appear as if it were melting as the viewer 'watched' it.  I thought there would be more obvious drips and coatings of glue, but most of it sunk into the gaps between glass pieces and stayed very close to the wire, so it is not as obvious.  

In Progress Photos:

Again, I'm really bad at remembering to take these, so most of these were taken when the piece was near-complete.  Basically, though, once I had created the armature, I place the piece on a sheet of tinfoil, poured glue on it, and started to shower it with glass shards.  I had to do this in several sessions because the glue had to dry before I could rotate the armature to add glass from another angle.  I kept pouring glue and glass, waiting for it to dry, and then rotating it.  Gluing it, letting it dry, turning it.  Because of the reflective nature of my work surface and the multitude of crushed glass, it's kind of hard to see my piece in the pictures.

Poetic Metamorphosis: Student Work

Final Solution:

      In making this piece, I wanted to visually compromise between how I saw the beginning of the story and how I saw the middle to end of the story.  In the beginning, I pictured cream coloured walls, medium wood, and richer accent colours.  Towards the middle of the story, however, I was beginning to picture dark, dusty corners, darker, dirtier walls, dark furniture, but really muted accent colours.  Wrapping these opposing visions up in one piece was challenging, but the use of watercolours lent itself really well to accomplishing this because they naturally produce lighter, but more muted colours.  

     As for the style of my piece, I wanted to produce furniture that was functional and believable, but still carried over an emotional sense of the story.  In order to do this, I chose to make all the furniture very long and narrow.  The reason for this was to produce a sense of discomfort and distance between the furniture, which is meant to accomodate a tall, narrow human, and Gregor the bug, who I saw as being very low to the ground, very wide, and rather round.  Although Gregor did not interact with the bed after getting himself out of it, I imagined the effect he would have on the mattress, which would have been to dirty it and to depress it, so I experimented with mark-making on the mattress pieces and made the mattress itself lumpy and misshapen.  I continued the sense of discomfort and distortion subtly by making the furniture legs different lengths.  This makes it seem precarious and unsettled, which it could have seemed visually to Gregor because he was so low to the ground, but also metaphorically because he was uncertain about his future need for this furniture, not knowing whether he'd ever become human again.  I wanted to elevate all of the furniture for a few reasons.  This is how I pictured it based on the time period in the story, but I also wanted to make it seem like Gregor would have room to hide underneath the furniture.  With the unevenness of the legs, however, he probably does not fit, adding to that discomfort because a narrowly denied pleasure tends to be more frustrating than one that has been firmly and outright denied.  

The bed.  

     The bed is very long and narrow, and Gregor is unable to fit completely on the width of the mattress.  The headboard is not meant to be representative of jail bars; they are simply tall and skinny like everything else.  I wanted the headboard to seem insubstantial because rather than trapping him, beyond the first part of the story, I saw the bed as actively refusing to be a refuge for Gregor.  It is not mentioned in the story at all once he finally pushes himself out of it, not even as an object in the room.  The mattress needed to be a cradle for Gregor in regards to the first part of the story in which he has difficulty getting out of the bed because of his round shell, but there also needed to be something about it which would seem discouraging to reentry, so I chose to make it just a little bit lumpy and uncomfortable looking.  

The dresser.

     I wanted to make the dresser as functional as possible, mostly because I am a detail oriented person, and what kind of a dresser doesn't have drawers?  The dresser is tall and skinny, again, because I wanted to create contrast between Gregor and the furniture.  The legs are uneven to communicate precariousness. The height, if viewed from below, would also seem ominous or threatening, much as the human world began to act toward Gregor.  I didn't alter the form of the dresser much above its legs because in the story, it was just an object in the room.  Gregor had no interaction with it, not even at the beginning of the story.  Although I made drawers that are able to slide out and open, I chose not to put anything in them because as a bug, Gregor now has no use for this piece of furniture, and as a human, he probably did not use it anyway because he was always ready to travel.  I considered filling the bottom drawer with the rotted food that Gregor refused to eat, but I chose not to because he made his discomfort with his new life more clear by refusing to touch the food and leaving out in the open than he would have by hiding it.

The blanket.

     When we began to talk about bedding in class, and many people mentioned that things in Gregor's room reminded them of things in their grandmothers' houses, I thought of a blanket that my grandmother had in her house.  It is a Scottish wool plaid blanket, very warm, but as is typical of Scottish wool blankets, also very itchy.  I knew that I wanted to use wool to add to my message of discomfort.  I created this blanket by twisting very thin strips of paper and then weaving them together. I purposefully kept the weaving from being very tight so that the blanket would be threadbare and unable to provide Gregor with any comfort.  It would also not be very helpful in his attempts to hide himself from his family, which emphasises the idea that his attempts to hide were rather futile in the first place because of his size and shape.  Some of the unraveling at the edges also calls to memory the franticness of Gregor's attempt to get out of bed, trapped on his back with his thin little legs thrashing around in the air.  There were several times in the story when Gregor's body seemed to be his own enemy.  The idea that, maybe in that first instant of realising he was a bug, he contributed to the destruction of something that could give him comfort is evident in this last feature of the blanket.  

  I imagined Gregor to be very round, with long spindly legs that scarcely supported him.  In my rendering of him, the legs don't even appear to support him and appear rather useless.  He is very near to the ground and is not at all agile.  I imagined him to be very large in the story; about the size of a trash can lid or a manhole.  This is evident in the scale of this piece in comparison with the bed I created.  

In Progress Photos:

     I'm bad at remembering to take these while I work because once I have a process down, I get so involved in executing it.  My method for construction was identical for each of the boxes that make up the mattress, box spring, dresser, and drawers; I simply adjusted measurements depending on the size of the object.

This is the construction of the drawers.

This is the construction of the blanket.  

     The most difficult thing was assuring that the ends would stay in place, even once the blanket was completely woven together.  Water helped a little bit, but I ended up with a little more unraveling at the edges than I would have liked.  This process took around an hour or two once I had all of my strips made.  Making the strips actually took longer than weaving them.  

Elements and Principles of Design: Student Work

Final Solutions:

Texture

I incorporated several textures into this piece.  The masking tape was weaved to create an interesting, bumpy surface.  Though the texture of this component is apparent through feel, I think it creates an even more appealing visual texture.  I added the pins to the top of the sculpture to create further protrusions and to anchor the weaving in place while keeping its edges free.  On the inside of the structure, I poked and gouged the wood to create a rough texture and added pyramidal scraps of wood, which are also found on the outside of the structure, to add a very prominent sense of topography and three-dimensionality to the sculpture.  I think the piece is very strong because even though it is meant to represent texture, it is also very unified through the repetition of triangular shapes.  This is also the strongest and sturdiest of the four sculptures.

Scale

I took the idea of scale very literally when thinking about my plan for this sculpture.  The basis of the sculpture is two square pieces of wood, one large and one small.  I chose to segment the large piece into three stacked rectangles in order to integrate an angled layering of tape that would further emphasise the difference in size between the two pieces.  The pins were functional in this piece and were very helpful in creating sturdy joints.

Unity

The word unity, beyond its denotative meaning, connotes a sense of elegance, delicacy, and simplicity to me.  I wanted to somehow evoke both the literal and emotional meaning of unity by creating a sculpture that reflects these other principles, as well.  I chose not to use any of the materials other than wood and (structurally) glue because I think they would have provided too much variety and distracted from the concept.  I chose to make the sculpture as symmetrical as possible, meaning that it looks similar from most angles, so there is unity in not only the sculpture itself but in how it is viewed.  The main feature of the sculpture is comprised of four thinly shaven curls of wood, which I think evokes the delicacy and elegance I associate with unity.

Variety

My intent in this piece was to portray variety through the use of several materials and through different uses of these materials.  Tape was employed in different lengths, widths, directions, and heights.  I combined geometric and organic elements in the base by rounding corners, carving out sections, and faceting edges.  I incorporated different textures, poking holes in the wood, piling scrap wood onto the base, letting the wood glue pool up in some areas, and adding topography to the focal wave of tape by adding pieces of wood and tape in between the layers.

In Progress Images:

Response to On Longing by Susan Stewart

"The body is the primary mode of perceiving scale"
This sentence reminded me of the concept of self-knowledge Diane Ackerman talked about in the article "Touch."  Ackerman says that the sense of touch is crucial to understanding one's own appearance, substance, and position in space, also known as proprioception.    Similarly, I can understand how one's own  body would become a reference of scale for other objects.  For example, the experience of going to see the Eiffel Tower is directly connected to the fact that the Eiffel Tower is much, much larger than the human body.  This experience is reversed with the idea of the souvenir that can be held in the hand.  I am not sure how this would affect the emotional or mental connection with the object or experience.  Obviously the souvenir evokes a memory of the place from which the souvenir originated, but how is this affected by scale?

"The souvenir reduces the public, the monumental, and the three dimensional into the miniature, that which can be enveloped by the body."
The significance of the scale change may be that this tiny object, which may represent a massive landmark, can now be transported with the person who has purchased or created it, and the memory, therefore can be voluntarily evoked at any time.  The problem with the public and monumental is that it obviously cannot be moved.  The importance of the object having the capacity to be enveloped by the body is that it has achieved a superior level of mobility.

"The place of origin must remain unattainable in order for desire to be generated."
The importance of a souvenir is memory.  Memory and experience are two different things.  An experience becomes an important memory when the uniqueness of the experience is realised.  If the experience of a place or time were easily accessible, it would most likely decline in importance for the person experiencing it, becoming a part of the mundane.  We most cherish things either that are lost to us or that we recognise as being ephemeral and fleeting.  We are less attached to the things that we believe are staples in our lives.