The purpose of the Time Map project was to choose an object from an important memory to represent certain emotions or to express something about the event. The object may be distorted or designed using other materials that conceptually reflect the memory. As I view memory as an incomplete and edited recording of the past, I instantly decided that my piece would be turned up, probably with parts missing.
My inspiration came after a chat with my friend that started as we walked pass a wine store. She asked me if I drink or if my family drinks a lot, I told her I don’t and in fact prevent drinking even if I want to drink away problems. She asked me why, and this was how I tried to trace back to the first time of drinking and the only time I drank in these couple of years.
That was about 3 years ago, when I was still in High School in Canada, that I was struggling with a cluster of issues in my life and simply could not adapt to the pressure. First, my grandfather passed away, and I was not informed until his body was cremated. My parents got divorced and talking to either of them was something that the other disliked. At school, rumors about the reason of my depressed mood were spreading – sadly, they were from my best friend. The approaching of final exam was adding another burden…It was a mess, a total disaster. I could not trust anyone and I didn’t know what to do to fix these issues. Eventually, I remembered people saying alcohol could help forgetting about the bad memories. So I got a bunch of beer, wine and champagne, went stay at hotel on a Saturday night, and drank out all the alcohol in a short time. I couldn’t see clear nor could I grip, so I accidentally shattered couple bottles. The glass fragments resonated with me as I felt broken as well. Family and friends, the two biggest aspect of my normal life, suddenly all became incomplete and devastated. To reflect my fractured mind, I decided to reproduce the bottles in my memory but had them shattered and distorted. So I got couple of perrier bottles (the color looked similar to the color of Heineken, wine and champagne bottles) and threw them several times.
Fig.1 – Shattered bottles in layers of plastic bags
The second emotion I want to express through the piece was the strength and determination I established after the drinking incident. The dizziness and lot of body control gave me much discomfort and caused my complete pass-out on the carpet. The next morning, after I saw the mess I made in the room and shocked by how sick I felt, I realized drinking did not solve my problem but could create more problems for me. So I decided to face things in the right way, and stayed away from alcohol ever since. The process of re-gluing the pieces back together by strong adhesive was a demonstration of my developed mental strength. Somehow, I achieved balance and did not feel fear and helpless when I thought about challenges. Starting from positioning the base of the bottles, I intentionally glued pieces from different bottles together to create bottles that were indeed mixture of bottles.
Fig. 2 – Cleaning and mixing of fragments
Fig.3 – Positioning of the bases
The final piece presented three intertwining bottles with top parts and some fragments missing. The design was also a visual representation of the last scene I saw before I fell on the floor and passed out: the merging bottles – possibly caused by the dizziness – on the coffee table with only their glass bottoms visible to me from that angle.
Fig.4 – Final Object View 1
Fig. 5 – Final Object View 2
