Breadth Piece #2

For the home project, I ended up deciding to use both paper and metal wire for my medium. It was really an intriguing process, because I hadn't worked with either of the materials before. Wire by far was the most difficult because it involved a different sort of thinking than clay. You cannot attach separate pieces of wire, so every single fold and bend must be accounted for. I figured out a long piece of wire can go short very quickly. After messing around with the wire for a little bit to get a feel for it. I started on the first part of my abstract sculpture: the roots.

The rest of my sculpture all involved paper. I choose to use pastel colored card stock, to give a more whimsical and childlike feel to the piece. The first part of the paper structure was an Indian head. It took a little while to draw it out on the card stock the same way I liked it in my sketchbook. I attached the two pieces of paper and made into a pocket, where I planned to put the wire inside later. I curled the "headdress" of the head, but later went back to add more dimensions. The eye hole I cut out as a house to further continue the concept of home.

The next step was to create the clouds, and idea I was inspired from one of the examples. This was were I got an opportunity to experiment with the dimensionality of paper. I was having a little bit of trouble keeping the paper 3-D as opposed to 2-D. I tried using folds and slits with an exacto to combine the layers of paper, but I found folding and hot glue to be a better tool. Again like the head, each cloud was formed like a pocket, so that it could easily slip onto the wire support that would come out of the head. Using the hot-glue gun technique, I next made the most important part of my sculpture, the skyscrapers. This was the hardest and most time consuming part because I could not cut the opening of the windows easily without exposing the underlying skyscraper. Again I created a double side pocket to allow for the other buildings and wire to give stable support.

The final putting together of all the individual parts proved to be a little challenging. It was really difficult to put the wire through the eye hole and get the sculpture to stand on its own. I had to do a lot of careful bending and re-arranging of the wire so that no parts of the sculpture sagged. All in all it turned out to be almost exactly how I had planned it out, and I'm content with the results. Also it was a nice change to not do any glazing or finishing of the piece. When it was done it was done.

Reflection

It took a little bit to adjust to the new material, but I didn't really feel that behind, and stayed on target to what I was expecting. The windows were a lot harder than I was expecting them to be. It was a challenging piece to think ahead on, because I had to adjust some of the arrangements of the piece so that it could be self-supporting. I really like how this piece turned out, but am ok without working with the time-consuming paper medium for a while.