Category Archives: Form Study

Final – Folding Wooden Silverware Set

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come up with an assignment that will push you and do it

After looking through our past assignments and figuring out what pushed us the most and brought out our best work, we had to come up with an assignment for ourselves that would do that even more and then do it. We’d bring in our assignment and the final product. My assignment was the following:

Make a usable object that either moves (not portable, but moves) or has moving parts.

I used wood, because I’m liking working with it, and a usable object because we hadn’t yet and I wanted to all semester. To accommodate the project, I decided to make a Swiss-army style folding silverware set. I found a woodworking store in Cambridge with a bunch of mahogany blocks for 10 bucks.

The casing is one piece, I tried cutting the three pieces out of it to use for the utensils, but when I chiseled them out they chipped and the casing chipped, so I scrapped that plan. I kept the utensils rectangular, so they’d fill the casing as completely as possible. I chiseled (very carefully) and hand-sanded out the spoon and used a wooden dowel through the whole piece for the hinge, epoxied into place on one end.

So far, all I’ve heard about food-safe care of wooden objects is keeping them clean and soaking or rubbing with olive or linseed oil whenever it gets dry so it doesn’t splinter. Pretty simple :) . I’ve got some future projects in mind for the rest of that wood, food-safe and not.

Word Sculptures

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make 5 pieces that embody our word

We had to use 5 materials we liked using to make 5 pieces that embodied our word. Each piece had to either exaggerate or contradict whatever strategies or techniques we used to make the previous piece.

Simultaneity isn’t always an easy thing to convey. For me, so far, projects had to be something recognizable, something used or known in real life. I didn’t deal well with the abstract. I didn’t work that way. I still don’t, really. So I immediately hated this project.

The first piece was made in-class on the day we got the assignment, but was constructed in such a way that it couldn’t be moved, and therefore wasn’t saved. Everything was balanced and arranged just so, any attempt to pick it up would make the whole thing fall apart. I had trouble with the abstract nature of the assignment at first, but once it started looking like a big sailing ship under construction, I had no trouble playing with an abstracted image of that.

The second idea came to me as a random doodle in art history, and was meant to just be lots of different kinds of construction methods, shapes and materials at once. I was particularly excited about the structural stuff I did with the cardboard, cutting two notches and two slots so they’d fit together and the notches would fit around the wooden piece on all sides, holding the cardboard fixture on top of the pillars. I contradicted the totally-random and unplanned nature of the first piece in making this one; it’s meant to be displayed with the diagrams and plans in the sketchbook.

The third piece is my least favorite in terms of a piece, but probably the best in terms of the assignment. I just doesn’t look very finished or good, but it embodies my word very well by being a bunch of things that all look like that, nothing else. This one was supposed to be contradicting the planning of the previous piece by just closing my eyes while I made it, but that didn’t work very well, I just kept peeking. A classmate suggested I not limit myself, but make it about only doing that one thing instead of thinking about how to make the whole piece, to just focus on making each connection until they build up to the whole piece.

After those two I went home for a long weekend over Thanksgiving, and I finished the rest once I got back. I got on a roll and finished the last 4 very quickly the day I got back to school.

Fourth, I wanted more of a finished looking piece, to contradict the random nature of the previous one. So this one was very arranged-looking, very finished-looking and I don’t know what it is, but I like it. I like the suspension of the string, the little spikes through the paper rolls, the cardboard notches and the civil-war-rifle-collection-look of the whole piece.

Last, I used the spike-through-paper-roll idea but took it as far as I could, using one giant roll, big cardboard pieces and a bunch of big spikes and making that the whole piece. I wanted to keep the taut string too, so I put that in as well.

Overall, I opened up a bit to abstract work, but I’m alright with it not being my preference.

Photo Book

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hand-made book of the word photos that embodies the word

This was cool. I like the idea of making books, for any reason, so that was enough to make it cool. Although, the word project getting on 3 weeks was getting a bit old for a class that was so far moving pretty quickly. Nonetheless, the photos was fun and the book was simple enough and worked out mostly.

It’s meant to be opened entirely and looked at all at once, so all images are visible simultaneously. Also, if viewed from one side, all the darker, more colorful and warmer-toned images are visible from foreground to background, from the other side all the lighter, black-and-white or just less-colorful images are visible. It worked out pretty well I think.

Word Photos

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photos of anything discovered off-campus embodying simultaneity

We had to chose one word from Yuichiro Kojiro’s ‘Forms in Japan’ and Richard Serra’s ‘verb list’, go out and find things off-campus and outside of our regular living spaces that embodied that word and photograph them. My word was simultaneity. From various parts of the city and the Natural History Museum at Harvard, and after two iterations including over 150 images, these are the final batch of 30 photos I came up with.

This assignment was cool. I’m not boasting, but I seem to have a knack for making photographic images, still or moving. And who doesn’t enjoy walking around with a camera, snapping at things they think are cool in ways that make them cooler? So this was fun. :P

We had two weeks, I don’t remember what camera I used, and there’s very little Photoshopping going on. Medium to minor curves adjustments on a bunch, a few I doctored a little more, and some less. Overall, the images are pretty close to what was photographed.

More Material Moves

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one move, 100-500 times, arranged

Following our material moves project we had to chose one of our moves and repeat it between 100 and 500 times and arrange them in whatever way we thought would be appropriate to the move.

I thought immediately ‘how awesome would it be to have a giant wall of fist-prints somewhere in school.’ So I did that, I punched and got other people to punch about 120 blocks, and arranged them like a brick wall with toothpicks holding them all together.

Everybody really liked the piece, but unfortunately, they wanted to see it somewhere else, in a location that complimented the piece more. Because of the way I’d put it together, I couldn’t just pick it up and move it or it would fall apart, so I had to take it apart, find a new location and build the whole thing again.

The second time around was much better. In order to find the wall you had to walk through the large empty room the first one was in, down a few steps into a dingy white-bricked hallway with a gray floor, and walk to the end of the hallway through a doorway into a small alcove and my new wall was in the corner. Nothing about it was new: I used the same bricks from the first wall, so they were more worn than before, broke and punched and kicked everything more, left debris on the floor and made pieces look like they were falling off. It was fun, I liked it much better, and so did the class.