Project Brief:
“REPRESENTING A SPACE OF YOUR CHILDHOOD with material tools only: Students are asked to use drawings,
mock-up models, photos and text. All projects need to be presented in class, then photographed and a complete presentation uploaded on the Electronic Portfolio.
For my project, I decided to carve the floor plan of my house into a book and write a story corresponding with each room. I wanted to represent my childhood space in a literal and metaphorical manner, all within one physical piece.
Final Piece:
My home in California is the space I wanted to represent because it is the place I spent most of my time when I was younger. At first, I did not know how I was going to represent such a larger and meaningful space, so I began to think of why my house is meaningful to me. Old memories began popping into my mind and I wanted to find a way to document them because, in essence, it is the memories of my childhood that make my home so the most impactful space of my childhood.
With these memories, I knew I wanted to document them through writing (a medium I have been exploring and developing more, recently). Each story went through a few stages: the first handwritten rough draft, the first edits made by my friend Sylwia, the second handwritten rough draft, the final edits made by Sylwia, and finally the hand-typed final version. This process was not as exact because some stories were edited either more or fewer than two times.
Also wanting to represent my house in terms of space, I had the idea of utilizing the official floor plans of my home. I was unsure of how I was going to represent them until I remembered a presentation Rachel Marks showed in my studio class. The presentation contained book carvings, an art form that I have been curious about for quite some time.
I carved the piece into a book because books represent the knowledge and education that is contained in my parent’s book collection back home in California. My parents always told me to read, because knowledge is power; I never understood what they meant until I moved away and no longer had such easy access to my parents’ books.
Process:
To carve the book, I made a basic print out of the real floor plan of my house and carved it into the book with an Exacto knife. The carving was a bit strenuous due to the fact that it is very time-consuming and tedious.
Writing the stories was quite simple, yet long because I kept editing my work while typing it. After writing each story, I bound them together and covered it with a piece of transparent paper, later sewing it into the actual book. Each transparent paper has a small illustration of a butterfly, an easter egg to one of the stories I wrote.
Knowing what it takes to make this project, there are few techniques that I have discovered that could make this project simpler and more aesthetically pleasing. Overall I am proud of the project because I have never explored book art, or used my writing within my art. In the future when developing this project there are a few things I would do differently; I would use a larger book, plan the logistics better, use a dremel tool, and allocate more time for construction.
