Integrative Studio 2 – Fiona’s Learning Portfolio

CONCEPT

My concept and theme for Bridge 4/Project 4 in Seminar and Studio is Japanese ceramic art. More specifically the impact of the Mingei movement on the aesthetic and purpose of Japanese tea ceremonies. As for my studio project’s final, I intend to create an interactive and contemporary booklet, which was inspired by traditional flip books.

Before settling on the final design, I’ve created a mind map of inspirations and concepts for my final piece. The mind map was helpful in terms of creating a cohesive concept along with my seminar essay, and helps me visualize my idea

PROCESS

In order to make the process clear and easier to understand, I will be breaking it into three major parts; making ceramic cups, designing the booklet, and producing the booklet.

Ceramic cups in making…

To start this project, I have to make and study the making of (hand-building) ceramic cups. I had to choose the most appropriate clay for hand-building cups, I’ve chosen 630 multi-use white clay (White Stoneware Clay: Ideal for all techniques such as wheel throwing and hand building. Cone 6 Shrinkage 13.0% Absorption 1.5%) as its the most appropriate clay for hand-building. the image below is a brief process of two methods I chose to hand-build my cups with.

Finally, I chose to use the slab building method because I prefer the finish and form better than the coil method.

Slab method on the left and coil method on the right

Glazed. To achieve the ‘washed out’ effect, I applied the white glaze and quickly wipe off the surface of the glaze, to reveal the clay underneath.

DESIGNING THE BOOKLET

For the medium of this project, I intended to redesign traditional flip book. I got my inspiration our guest speaker, Yucheng and Kat Bawden. Initially, I was fascinated by interactive books that requires care, time, and creativity. Therefore I chose the size of my main page, and use Adobe Illustrator to render the pattern of my book. We also went to the image archive in the NYC public Library to gather some information for the cups.

This is the pattern that I intend to print on a large sheet of paper using plotter printer.

I’ve made three different versions of the booklet, each of them are different in folding techniques and folding directions. After I’ve made my decision on which booklet style I wanted, I labeled the pages with two different colors. The black color represents the order of the pages when viewed from the front page (?), and blue indicates the page order based on the unfolding order.

After taking photos of the cups, I used Procreate to move and re-arrange the cups into the way I wanted it to.

this is how it looks after I arranged the cups.

PRODUCING THE BOOKLET

I used the plotter printer to print the booklet, I used a bone fold to create the crease for a cleaner fold.

using a ruler to guide the bone fold for a straight line.

FINAL PRODUCT

REFLECTION

As a reflection: if you had all the time, budget and support in the world, how could you see this project developing further?
– I would either mass produce this using traditional washi paper for that organic texture and sell it, or I would print this HUGE and make it an interactive art work.

Ideally where would you like it be installed, viewed, or shown (in a gallery, museum, public, bookstore, online, etc)?
-I would install this piece in public or museum. Ideally a zen garden with tatami to really submerge yourself into the tea ceremony environment.

What was the biggest “ah-ha” moment for you in your process? Perhaps this came to you through thinking or how your idea developed, or through your making process.

When I started working on ceramics. It pulled out the “eager to learn more” side of me and it made me more interested in this topic. Also, when I started folding and assembling the booklet, things started to fall in place and that was comforting.

You can choose anything from Project 1: Change, Project 2: Public Poetics, or Project 3: Communication, or a combination of, if some of the ideas overlap. Was there any idea or making process that stood out to you? Did a theme emerge in your work so far? Is there a topic that you would like to further research or spend more time with?

Please write, in your own words, to accompany your images, to tell the story of a project that stood out to you, along with inspiration, sketches, questions that came up, and final results. Submit a link to your post here on Canvas.

I chose the third project Communication. This was my very first collaborative project, and the making process stood out the most to me because of having to collaborate and communicate with another student who I’m not familiar with. In this project I was able to challenge myself to step out of my comfort zone and merging my culture with another student, I learned how to write Hindi, learned how a new foreign language works, learned about its system, and learned about the similarities and differences between my language/culture compared to my partner’s.

The intention of this piece was to act as a personal dairy. Everyday me and my partner wrote down our deepest doubts, insecurity, and random feelings throughout the day in our own language, which is the most intimate language to us. I then translated it into Hindi and English to see how similar our language look like side to side and hopefully to understand and being able to ‘read’ our partner better.

The inspiration of this project was to make a combined language of Thai and Hindi. During discussion, we realized how similar it is between Thai and Hindi, we realized the apparent similarities and the spelling similarities. We made the ‘alphabets’ based on English’s alphabets. We matched the most similar sounding alphabet from our language to English, and finally we look for similarities between Hindi and Thai to create Thandi.

The Challenges: One of the biggest challenge was to communicate with my partner, its complicated when it comes to finding a time where we can sit down and talk about this project in person due to our polar opposite class schedules. We communicate through texting and calls to make this work. The second challenge was keeping the booklet together. At first I tied knots through the holes on the edge of the booklet to secure the paper, however, the knots became loose and eventually fell apart. My solution to this problem was to use book binding tape to join the paper together.

This is a chart in Hindi that sounds similar to English alphabet made by my partner.

This is a page in my notebook, this was the initial planning of combining the characters. We was inspired by any particular piece, it just came to my mind naturally.

This is a time laps of me writing Thai characters that sound similar to English alphabets. (Made this in Procreate)

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Fiona’s Learning Portfolio

Category: Integrative Studio 2

Int Studio 2: Visual Culture.V25.Sp23 – Project 4: Final Project