Gabriella Fussner
My name is Gabriella Fussner and I am a Product Design major at Parsons School of Design. When I got in to Parsons, it was a shock that I was going to pursue Product Design because I have spent years learning filmmaking. Though, I was still extremely excited, I was also worried.
Going into first year, I took Space and Materiality, which really changed my schooling experience. Alison McNulty was my professor, and she made me learn so many new skills. She encouraged me to try woodworking and metal shop, two things that I now know I love and can use in the future of my Product Design. Not only that, I learned how to use the laser lab and the wet lab. I just feel like I now have so many options and endless possibilities to what I can make. She had a background in sculpture, but I think that worked to my advantage, as I want my products to be art objects as well.
I also noticed conceptually, my Time teacher, Joseph Ayers, helped me apply what I believe is important into my own work. He also showed me many aesthetics, films, and artists that have largely impacted my perspective, such as the film, Waking Life, or the artist Hito Steryl. In his class I made films that really fulfilled me, and made work that I truly believed in. This was super important for me. I made work about the environment, as well developing one of my niche film aesthetics, and cant be more happy for how supportive Joseph was in my very bizarre, morbid, horror, comedy.
Thesetwo sculptures were the highlight of my first year at Parsons. I went through so much conceptualizing, planning, drawing, learning new skills, actually assembling the sculptures. My process for both of these sculptures were so step by step, and seeing how it went from a concept to a real life object that takes space, meant a lot to me as a product designer.
Both sculptures were hybrids of two important objects in our house. For my wooden sculpture, a rosary and a shell. For my metal sculpture, prayer flags and binoculars. Just seeing how they came out and how they derived from things that meant so much to me, was really special. We took the formal qualities of our objects and applied them into our sculptures. It was a long process, designing the sculptures. I had to make so many iterations of each sculpture in my notebook, then had to choose one to really work on. Once I chose the designs I wanted to actualize, it was a matter of learning howtocut wood, learning how to weld metal, taking out the measuring tape, making mistakes, going to the shop multiple times a week, asking for help from the shop workers. The whole experience was so gratifying when my sculptures came out. I hope to find this feeling many times, over and over again, in my future years at Parsons.
Coming to a conclusion, this first year has been hard and tedious. I am ready to apply the skills I have learned in my first year, to the products, artworks, and philosophies I will be developing in the future. I want to get better at woodworking and metal shop, as well as planning and designing my ideas on paper.
