30.11.20 - Gathering Items and Deconstructing

Now that I have a better idea of what I want to do, I have started gathering materials to produce experimental work out of. I started with discarded wires and other objects from the workshop and began cutting them open.

 

I was really surprised at how beautiful the insides of many of these cables were, containing colourful wires in a dull grey casing. This ethernet cable was easy to take apart and retrieve the coloured strands from, and I held onto the offcuts of the grey cable to use in future experiments.

This cable contained copper wires which are very hard to cut through, but I was able to cut away the outside to reveal the beautiful metallic colour inside as if opening a rock to find a fossil or amethyst.

I discovered that the cross section of this cable had a flower shape inside and it reminds me that allusions to natural forms appear throughout much of the artificial world, and I wonder how I could involve this in my project.

The next thing I dissected was this unwanted wind-up toy. I cut the fur off and then the plastic body easily opened up showing the mechanism inside. All of the pieces were simple to take apart and I arranged them on the page to show the toy's anatomy which included a metal coil, a spring and some cogs - all very old fashioned technologies that have been used in toys over many generations.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

29.1.21 - Objects in the Bath and Shower

Image
One of the first things that came to mind when I got the re-arrangement brief was to do something with my collection of beanies. Because they are so colourful, I decided they should go against a plain background, so I cleaned the bath out and started filling it with the animals.  The first set of photos shows the animals in a random arrangement where I photographed them from different angles... For these close up images I placed the camera in the bath with the animals and blindly took the photographs, not knowing what the results would be. The flash came on for these pictures which makes the in-focus areas appear very sharp with a clear representation of the animals' surface textures. They also remind me of claw machines in arcades, which gives the images a nostalgic feel - all of these beanies were manufactured in the 1990's and early 2000's. This is the thing that opens and closes the plughole in the bath, and it created some strange reflections of the beanies which look
Read more

'Shades of Green' exhibition at St Mary's Church

Image
'Shades of Green' is a Nottingham city artists studio group exhibition, with various works about the longing to be in green spaces during lockdown and the artists reactions to isolation. My favourite was Karl Wilby's 3D piece with the whales and flowers. I think it's really clever how they seem to be floating in the air and are feeding from the flowers like humming birds, it's also really interesting to see whales represented in such a small scale, it's quite surreal and endearing. I like the contrast between the reflective coppery metal flowers and the matt turquoise whales which suggest the colour of oxidised copper, showing a transition from new to old - shiny to rusty - maybe also alluding to the endangerment of the species. There seems to be quite a strong connection between this piece and our fabricated nature project because of how naturalistic the whales are, when in fact they have been made through 3D printing which is as artificial as it gets. The meta
Read more

Mike Kelley Style Photoshoot

Image
  Mike Kelley's 'Ahh... Youth' piece inspired me to make my own version using old teddies from home, including some from my parent's childhood and some from my own - plus a recently acquired 90's troll doll from a car boot sale. I set up the studio lighting in a way that would reduce shadows behind the objects and used a white background like Kelley's image, which gives a professional atmosphere that  elevates them from being worn-out old creatures to something special and celebrity-like. I used a tripod so that they are all to scale with each other, and I like the empty space around them, it's like they have room to breathe and think. I also had to adjust the ISO, white balance and shutter speed on the camera to suit the light and conditions of the space, then I used manual focus to get the sharpness that allows you to see all the details and textures. After uploading the photos to the computer, I cropped them on photoshop and classified them into two separ
Read more