Upon completing my sculpture, I immediately began to worry that it was too literal. I felt that it became too much of an architectural piece to look at rather than abstractly illustrating the ideas I took away from the reading. However, I liked the way it looked with the cohesive textures and color pallet.
My sculptural object is made out of styrofoam cubes and cones. I cut into them so that I could show an inside and an outside of the shapes. I pinned magazine cutouts on both sides, along with burlap and cork for the outsides and decorative paper on the inside. The pieces are stacked and placed in a small box and pinned together. The ground of the sculpture is laid with burlap and layered with a magazine cutout of a rug underneath.
After reading the article, the points I took away were the ideas that architects, unlike other fine artists, really have to think about both the outside of a building and the inside. They must design while keeping in mind the clients wishes. This is why I decided to cut open the styrofoam pieces, so that the viewer can experience it both from the inside and the outside. I further represented this idea with magazine cutouts on both sides of the pieces to show the point of views of being on the outside looking in and the inside looking out. Additionally, I used burlap and cork on the outside and decorative paper on the inside to oppose the different materials used for each. The inside has a cohesive design with a chosen color pallet. I made wallpaper for the inside by using a stencil on paper. This represents the idea that architects must abide by the clients wishes and sometimes may have difficulty showing their own style. The article notes that showing an architects’ individuality and personality through their designs is difficult for that reason, and their designs used to go uncredited. That is why I placed a signature reading “Anonymous” on the bottom of the piece.
After this process, I believe that my sculpture contains interesting points from the article and I represented them well. However, I’m curious to find in myself new and abstract ways to represent ideas, rather that literally placing them on an object. I think, aesthetically, the object looks attractive and stylistic, however the shape was not as unique as it could have been.
