Up and Down… Around we go…But not away

For this assignment, we had to represent a space of our childhood.

The Research:

First we had to brainstorm and I came up with 3 ideas:

A specific Carousel
The pool I learned to swim in
My grandfather’s lap

I was more drawn to represent the carousel because it was once of my earliest memory and it had a specific background behind it.

In fact in 2006, the civil war strikes in Lebanon while my family and I were away on vacation in Paris. Because of the war, the airport in Lebanon was closed for 4 months, therefore, my brother, my father, my mother and I were blocked in Paris for 4 months. Even though I was really small I remember vividly the feeling being bored, scared, afraid and confused. I knew something was wrong and my parents were protecting us from the sad news but I still peaked sometimes at the TV and heard the news that often recorded sounds that I referred to war. I also remember missing my family and my friends since it was summertime.

To pass time, me and my brother used to spent so much time on carousel and that’s the origin of my memory of childhood.

The Process:

At first I laser cutted some cardboard into circles and used 4 for the base, 2 for the 2nd base and 1 for the top circles.

Then with clay I represented my family that was only composed by 4 people at the time. At first I represented all of us together but when I put it on the 2nd the base of carousel I had trouble with the balance so I had to separate the sculpture in two because the board isn’t stable to show how unstable the situation was either it was at home or in here in Paris. The representation of my family was meant to be simple since I really wanted to represent the carousel and the fact of being trapped here from my memory and not from a picture and the only thing I remember about my family was that we were together. I decided to not color it because when I put up the bars I liked how it gave the impression that my family was fading away between the bars the same way the memory of family was fading away to give place to the carousel.
Then I worked on the bars of the carousel with clay, I wanted them to express signs of trying to get out of this prison that’s why they are scratched and some of them are broken to show all of the way we tried to get out.

Then I spray painted the piece of cardboard in white so the color stands out correctly.

And finally I put it all together

Difficulties I encountered:

The first difficulty I encountered was the one I mentioned before about the balance.
The second one is that the carousel is not working because of the weight on it but it used to work before putting the family and the bars on it. For improvement in the future I would study more the material before working on the project in order not to get into the same trouble.

Here’s a video of the mechanism of the carousel turning before putting the sculptures: