Artist Statement: Midterm

  I recall my last my foundation design teacher saying that I think outside the box. I told him I didn't know there was a box. I have these ideas and every new thing has a way of inspiring me and I really have been enjoying myself in this class because of the level of freedom I have.
  What was particularly challenging, no, new to me was working with a partner. Of course I have worked with people before but never with my art. Honestly if I didn't have Sapientia I would have made that room of lanterns I dreamed about during the start of this project.
  So, for project one, our initial idea was to create lanterns with a modular surface. We wanted  to have a theme and for some reason Sapientia wanted to do a underwater theme, she seemed really excited about it so we went with it. When Sapientia started to make the first lantern it reminded me so much of a pufferfish that the huge generalization of the "ocean" narrowed down to "fish". So the paper sequences were inspired by scales and the swirlies were my idea to add modularity to Sapientia lovely design on the first lantern. The swirlies themselves were reminiscent of barnacles to me, so I thought it remained consistent with our idea of underwater and fish theme.
  Project two consisted of serial planes and the use of re-purposed material. I wanted to do something as a dedication to my high school environmental teacher and my love for nature. Knowing me, I go over the top so I tried to make a little serial plane and work off of that. Then I talked to Heather and she gave me some good ideas but I felt I could not bring my ideas to life without jumping ship.
  I wanted to use branches, bottles, and things I found around my house as my found materials so I went scavenging. I went to parks, around my neighborhood (which is rather littered), and my own home to find what I needed. I found the perfect branches in my little sisters' school park although they were rather huge, awkward to carry, and constantly poking me. I used corks from terracycle which had an Earthiness to it due to its color and texture and since I was doing something biomorphic it made sense to use.
  The outcome of this project had a mysticism to it that reminded me of my childhood and my belief of trees as grand and mysterious beings. It could be due to my use of reflective materials: mirrors. But the original concept for my project was the idea of what makes trees wither away. I did not want to focus more on what causes the tree to get sick like enviornmental stress, drought, bugs, pollution, etc instead I wanted to focus more on the end result: its death by disease. I'm not sure if I made that obvious but I think my love and appreciation for trees and my teacher took away the sadness associated with death, even for trees.
  I felt as though project two came out rather well and I hope for future projects I can be more organized, pay attention to detail, and keep my train-of-thought chugging.