Display Ideas

Now that I have a good number of cartons I've got to start thinking about how I'm going to display them. On my desk I experimented with different arrangements which I have photographed here.

 Grid

I think the grid creates a sense of functionality and resembles the way products are shipped to stores and stocked on the shelves; the orderliness takes away any sense of individuality like a group of soldiers in formation, undermining the fact that each carton I've made is unique. From the viewers perspective this arrangement makes it difficult to see the details of the cartons towards the back and we only really see the tops of them, so I don't think I will use this arrangement because I want all of the cartons to be visible.

This picture taken from a low angle visually reminded me of Peter Eisenmans 'Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe', the Holocaust memorial in Berlin - and the dystopian feeling of being lost among the grid of towering concrete blocks. 

https://www.archdaily.com/938511/peter-eisenman-designing-berlins-holocaust-memorial



Line

Similarly to the grid, this arrangement has an unnatural, forced sense of order, but what I like about it is that you can see each one clearly and the tall vertical shapes combine to create a wide horizontal formation. With the exception of the marbled ones, there is a continual line traveling through them where I have dipped them in glaze, but each one is a slightly different level so there is a kind of fluctuation as your eyes travel across the line - we read from left to right so I assume that is how most people will view an arrangement like this. I like how the dipped cartons are at varying levels because it can represent many things, for instance I could arrange them from lowest to highest to represent rising sea levels, or in the reverse order to represent Earth's draining of resources, and our time running out.

The sun illuminating the cartons looked really beautiful as the white clay looks really radiant as it reflects lots of light and the glazes look more vivid and deep. Hopefully I will be able to create good lighting when I exhibit them as a final piece.

Random

Here I arranged them facing different ways and some lying down and layered on top of eachother. It has that chaotic feel that I talked about in my post about Tony Cragg's 'Spyrogyra' bottle rack sculpture, and a certain degree of precariousness. It shows a weakness in manmade structures and makes me imagine fallen buildings of a collapsed human civilisation in the future - I chose to include my broken pieces to emphasise that image of destruction and decay. 

On a more logistical level, I don't know if I can display my cartons like this in the exhibition because I want them to be enclosed in a cabinet for protection due to how fragile they are and how tempting it is to pick one up. I have been able to find a glass cabinet but it is an upright one with 3 small shelves so there wouldn't be much room to play with this kind of random arrangement. So my next step will to be take my cartons down to the exhibition space and try placing them in the cabinet to see how I can make a visually exciting and meaningful display.

Sketching lay out ideas.

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