Story of a project

1. Techniques and Materials

• How did you arrive at the materials and the technique you used in the end? 

Last semester I had purchased many materials so I would usually use the things I had purchased and made that work. I had a large sheet of foamboard, acrylic paint, and brushes. I think the only thing I purchased for this project were more x-acto knife blades and t-pins to use as joinery. 

• How did you deal with difficulties? 

I had a few difficulties, I had most of my materials at home so I decided to do the project at home rather than bring all the materials to Parsons so I had to make something that would be easy to carry on my commute to Manhattan. Luckily foamboard was light to carry so I decided not to make my project too big so it would be easier to carry. I took the project to school on the day that it was due because I knew it would be safer to store at home rather than at school, I didn’t know that it was going to rain that day so I had to keep myself and my project safe from the rain while on my commute. 

Another difficulty of this project was that we weren’t allowed to use conventional adhesives, we had to mechanically join everything together. Since I had done a sketch and had a general idea of what I wanted to end product to look like I knew what I was looking for. I had purchased two different sets of pins ones with rounded tips, the ones people put on maps, and t-pins because they were both different lengths and I wasn’t sure which one would fit better. I ended up using t-pins.

2. Iterations and Drafts 

• What did you learn from each draft? What steps did you take to improve the work?

I didn’t have too much time to work on drafts so I had invested my time planning how I was going to execute it. I made sketches in illustrator and was able to get a very good idea of what the final product would look like. The steps I took to improve the work was to try different ways of propping the piece up, I used the same material as the piece but made different stands for it. 

• What risks did you take? 

I tried using the acrylic paint as an adhesive since I was already going to paint the foamboard I decided to try and use the paint itself as an adhesive. It worked a bit but was too sensitive and I didn’t want to risk the panels from falling off so I put in the t-pins for good measure.

3. Inspirations 

My main inspiration was Carrie Mae Weems since we had to make a sculpture on an artist we had never heard of. I took inspiration from a specific series of hers: “The kitchen table series”, “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried” and her general black and white photographs. I wanted to make the sculpture an abstract representation of her original work and the first thought that came to my mind was using colors and rectangles. I took the rectangle from the table series and the colors from the black and white photographs along with the red photos from “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried”, I wanted to make the red simple and stand out since her series of photographs had that effect on me when I saw them for the first time.

4. Influences 

• What do you think has influenced you in your life to gravitate towards certain materials and subject matter? 

My father has always been cautious when it comes to spending money so when I am not familiar with a certain material I want to use for my work I tend to choose something cheap or similar so I can experiment without spending too much in case I need more material. I’m glad I did because I discovered many different uses for the materials I had purchased and I will definitely be using them again.

• What were immediate, current influences? 

My current fascination and want to make sculptures definitely served as an influence along with my passion for photography since Weems mostly uses photography she was definitely an interesting artist to investigate. In terms of materials I had never really used foamboard before college and it was a material I was really keen on using because I knew how versatile it could be so I had purchased a large sheet of it at the beginning of the year and used it for many projects and in many different throughout the first semester. 

5. Research

When I was given this assignment I had no idea who Carrie Mae Weems was and I quickly fell in love with her work. I didn’t delve too much into her history, I decided to look more at her work and what I was missing out on. I was amazed by the powerful imagery she captured with her camera. All I did in terms of research was to google her and scroll through her website and google images to get a sense of her work, I then started going deeper into her more specific bodies of work like “The kitchen table series” and “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried” which really stood out to me because of their simplicity and how powerful those images were.

These are some photos by Carrie Mae Weems that served as inspiration for the sculpture:

Link to original LP post about Sculpture: https://portfolio.newschool.edu/brunojansen/2019/11/08/red-tile-sculptural-response/