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Final Submission Sem. 1

a write up for this work along with additional notes, drawings and plans can be located towards the back of my A5 visual diary.

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Final Submission Sem. 1

a write up for this work along with additional notes, drawings and plans can be located towards the back of my A5 visual diary.

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I didn't stretch the material too taught onto the frame because i knew i needed to accomodate for the stretch that i wanted when suspending the object which will rest in its centre. here is some other documentation of some tests sinking stones into the fabric while elevating the frame with a plinth to get a feel for how the objects would look sinking into the fabric. While doing this i realised that the frame still wasn’t secure and would need further adjusting and strengthening.

In the top two photos pictures the reinforcements which i made to ensure the frame would be stable enough to hold together but also become suspended with objects weighing down from them. I cut two timber lengths to the same widths of the middle of the frame and anchored them with screws across each side. I also anchored the eyelet screw hardware into the frame towards the middle as i decided it would be most stable through its thickest and most durable section of the frame which i will hang from six lengths of braided wire.

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When constructing the frame i had to drill both square sections together in the middle and attach flat screw plates to each outer edge to securely fasten the two to one another. I then laid the frame down and cut the material to size to then flip it so it rests underneath the wooden structure so that i could fold, stretch and attach the fabric to the outer edges of the wood.

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Final Hand in Sem.2 Planning

some photo documents of the space to which my work will be installed. while i am still in the process of constructing it, based on how secure sections of the ceiling are in this space will influence how i anchor the hardware to suspend the frame i am planning on hanging.

I would ideally like to centre the work giving it as much breathing space as possible. Diagram and annotated notes about the full installation process can be found in my A5 visual Diary.

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Anish Kapoor Decent into Limbo

one of many favourite works of mine created by Kapoor.

creating a bottomless void

A space to descend. A space to slip into and escape from the world.

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Rain storm photographic study

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selected works by Koji Enokura

‘The everyday slides into the pulse of the physical body and is transmitted outside along with it. There exists a dull sense of skin-like membrane that separates our existence from the everyday world. What is frightening about our relation to objects is that when we persistently look at things–a cup, for example–the connection between the object and its name becomes tenuous. The cup turns into glass, the glass into transparency, and transparency infinite. It’s necessary to fix this ambiguous and expanding relation between humans and objects somewhere and spit it out with the body’s pulse. A cup, chair, and window contains all. A cup, however, is a cup; a window is a window; and light is light. Cups, windows, and light all have a multi-layered weight behind them. This is why we cannot possess them.’ 

– Koji Enokura, “Souzou no genten” [the origin of creativity], Mizue, Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, Jan. 1972.

Koji Enokura was fundamentally interested in the real responses and interventions that occur when the physical human body and materials confront each other in space. He aimed to use his own body as a medium to problematize the reciprocal relation between things and the space exterior to them. Like in the quote above, this membrane which exists between our existence and the physical everyday world is something i really want to try to make tangible through my work. To encapsulate or envelop those entanglements which occur both inside and outside the body and through modes of art making we can intercept those feelings through space and material configurations.

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Planning/Drawing/Brainstorming for final submission installation/sculpture making.

dividing/redirecting space

working with weight, opacity, contrasting materials, tension of materials

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Plans for future works

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Cristina Iglesias

Cristina Iglesias became a figure to be reckoned with in the international art scene in the mid-1980s. After studying in London, where she discovered contemporary British sculpture, she returned to Madrid and there developed her own formal vocabulary. She is part of that generation which, in the early 1980s, re-discovered the potential of the figure, the image, the decorative and the motif, and opened up the sculptural object to its expansion in a site. By questioning the traditional space of the ‘white cube’, the artist invites spectators to enter a new and mysterious world. Interested in the poetry of various forms of matter and their immaterial traces, she questions the intrinsic nature of these bodies, and reveals both the dialogue of iron, wood, zinc, crystal and plants, and their interplay of shadows, invariably in order to subvert the rules of a geometry that is too formal. To these abstract motifs she then adds puns and words, in a fiction which the weave intermingles. In Sans titre (Celosia III, 1998), the humble materials line the space with letters forming a closed three-dimensional environment, which light first passes through and then develops its power in the environment. Raffia, sisal rope and light thus compose Sans titre (Passage II, 2002), an installation of 17 mats hanging above the visitor, with light passing through them, thus making a path of shadows and letters, which describes the descent underground of an Arab caliph, taken from a story by William Beckford. These spatial arrangements incorporate the visitor’s physical experience in an open work, and continue to deconstruct sculptural conventions: neither mass, nor substance, nor volume, nor geometry.

I feel like Cristina Iglesias’s work is of significance because she is working with a variety of sculptural materials to redefine the space her work occupies. Her work explores the idea of a space which is relevant to my interests in cities and urban environments and the ways which our lives become compartmentalised in order to control and systemise the way and the places where people carry out specific activities. In some of her work pictured above I am really enjoying the way she utilises her materials in obstructive and unapologetic ways, disturbing the conventional movement and activity which occurs in the white cube space she is able to stir a new conversation and a new interaction between object/space/material/viewer. Her work allows her audiences to reconsider the various forms an artwork can come in.

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Marry Miss

1994 | JYVASKYLA UNIVERSITY

The Sixth International Alvar Aalto Symposium, ‘Architecture of the Essential,” held in Jyvaskyla, Finland, addressed the issues of building within the context of diminishing resources. Miss was asked to do a temporary installation, she focused on the pine trees of the Finnish landscape and explored how to make this ever-present element a subject of specific consideration and reflection.

The blanket of tall pines surrounding the town extends to the campus as well. Behind the auditorium designed by Aalto is a large stand of trees with paths forking to either side of the sloping terrain of the grove. The stand consists of mature pines with a clear floor of pine needles below. Approaching this grove the visitor’s attention is brought from the height of the pines to the horizontal surface of the floor of the forest. It appears as though this surface is being built up. There, one sees a series of long wood framed troughs embedded in earth berms. Each trough is filled with still water catching the reflection of the trees above. The semi-circular interior of each trough is lined with shiny galvanized metal and seems to hold the imprint of the individual tree to which it is attached.  From an adjacent viewing platform it is possible to see seven parallel long troughs as mirrored fragments of the pine trees. The utilitarian nature of the structures engages the viewer in questioning their use. The mirrored surface and repetition of troughs and wood framing elements suggest they may extend beyond this immediate location. The visitor is engaged directly with the basic elements of earth, water, trees as s/he moves through the area.  The work, the viewer, and the site are revealed as inseparable, as indeed they are in any consideration of the conjunction of built and natural environments in our future.

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Lee Ufan Marking Infinity

Lee is acclaimed for an innovative body of work that revolves around the notion of encounter—seeing the bare existence of what is actually before us and focusing on “the world as it is.”

Since his early Mono-ha period, Lee has restricted his choice of sculptural materials to steel plates and stones, focusing on their precise conceptual and spatial juxtaposition. The steel plate—hard, heavy, solid—is made to build things in the modern world; the stone, in its natural as-is state, “belongs to an unknown world” beyond the self and outside modernity, evoking “the other” or ��externality.”

Arranging the plates in precise relationships to the stones, Lee’s Relatum series (1968– ) presents a durational form of coexistence between the made and the not made, the material and the immaterial elements of our surroundings. The series title is a philosophical term denoting terms, objects, or events between which a relation exists. In Lee’s mind, the occasion of the site-specific work and the network of dynamics it triggers is more important than the object per se, and we the viewer enter the scene as an equal part of the whole.

Mr. Lee’s “Relatum” series bears the strong stamp of the Minimalism and Conceptualism movements of the 1960s and ’70s. A philosopher and the author of 17 books, he was a prime theorist of the Tokyo-based Mono-ha (School of Things) movement of the same era. He said that the original purpose of Mono-ha was to “combine what is made with what is not made,” bringing together man-made materials and objects with natural ones, like the rocks, to animate the space between them in a kind of performance.

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James Turrell

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‘Blurry Venice’ Venice Bienale 2019

a beautiful installation work from the recent Venice Bienale.