Tag Archives: paper

Memory

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single image representing/recreating early memory

This was a cool intro assignment. A nice substitute for the usual get-to-know-you stuff in the beginning of a course, and a cool way to explore visual communication.

The assignment outline was to make a single image that represents or recreates a childhood memory from before we were 12, and to include ourselves or a representation of ourselves in the image in some way.

My memory is an early and fairly traumatic one: I lived in Honduras from ages 5-9, so when I was maybe 7 we took a little vacation at a beach house somewhere on the coast (I’m not sure where we were). Night snorkeling, sea kayaking, and general goofing around were wonderful in that setting. And boating out to mini-islands and finding old broken wooden canoes and paddles made it all the more piratey. :D

The memory for this image, though, is much less wonderful:

I was maybe 7 years old, and I was in the house one day reading The Lion King. I got to the part in the gorge where the dad gets trampled, and it became suddenly vividly clear to me that I was going to die someday. No sugar-coating, no delayed realization, just instant ‘oh-shit’ as a little kid in the middle of this wonderful book.

This image is how that concept came to me at the time: a kind of disembodied, or rather unconnected, porthole through which we see the world as we go through life, and eventually, someday, it’s just going to close, and that will be it. The end.

It was shocking, and terrifying, and needles to say the rest of the day was pretty rocky. And since then it’s been a recurring image, my image of my perception of death whenever it happens.

I remember the memory as it happened, with me on my knees in the room, reading the book, a maid somewhere, the general look and feel of the room, I remember it being wood floors, and my family was elsewhere in the house. But when I think back on the memory, the realization, this is what comes to mind, and it seems to communicate the idea very effectively.

Technically, formally, I wanted the piece to fill your whole field of vision, so when you’re the right distance from it, it’s all you see. Because that is all we see in life – what we see as we go through life – and the rest are tools to communicate what’s happening. The porthole is essentially our field of vision, the ‘shutter’ or closing tunnel is the ending of my life, and a closeup shows some streaks I was able to just rub into the paper it was printed on. Underneath is a pretty typical image of life, just a short of nature that’s specific enough to be clear but unspecific in terms of location or what’s exactly going on in the frame that it just communicates the idea of life and not a place or time.

I wanted some dimensionality in the piece, so after mocking it up in Photoshop I decided to sort of collage it together, but printing it out, cutting up the three layers, and layering them on top of each other (so the forest image glued down, and plain paper glued around it to make a solid layer at its level, and the same done for the next two layers on top, so it would be in relief, but not extremely so. I didn’t want there so be so much craft that it detracted from the message of the piece. I ended up siding with just cutting out the life image, since the porthole and the shutter could be on the same level, but more honestly, it was just too hard to cut out the porthole perfectly. That long round curve was a delicate thing to cut.

Printed on plain matte paper, the outside of the porthole was originally white, but that didn’t fit the piece in really any way, and I played with the idea of cutting it out, but again, I didn’t want to mess up the long curve. I ended up just filling it in with a jumbo Sharpie, and it gave it this awesome velvety effect when it’s mounted on the wall. Everybody in class thought it was real velvet until they looked closer. Even the teacher couldn’t tell :P . Lastly, I tried to have some white milkiness coming in from the edges of the nature image, as if you go slightly blind as you die, trying to mimic those white-out eyes of blind dogs or people. It kind of worked, but to enhance the idea I scratched away those areas with a fine X-acto knife.

This got a good response, and the rest of the class did good work too, I’m looking forward to the stuff we all contribute.

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.