Artist’s Statement
For this project, we were asked to create three-dimensional art forms and objects that used the concept of serial planes or similar construction techniques. In working with serial places, we had to consider how the form could be sliced up to make regular intervals to form an object. There are hundreds of objects and 3D forms that surround our everyday lives, and we were supposed to replicate one that has a connection relating back to our theme of community. The moment this project was introduced, I knew that I wanted to do some type of architectural structure because of the natural way that buildings are made goes hand in hand with some of the techniques that actually architectures use to make such models. I decided to construct the Eiffel towel as symbolism to illustrate people’s desire to travel and discover the world, Paris is one of the places that is iconic on the travel bucket-list. I really wanted to take this idea out of the scope of just my own personal desires and to make it relatable to people in my community. Traveling is something everyone wants to do at some point in their lives and so many people can relate to the piece I’m creating. I also intended to make the Eiffel tower as a representation of love and beauty. We associate Paris with being the center of love and romance and that is what I wanted to emanate from making this iconic structure. Functionally, because I constructed my piece using the laser cutter, all the pieces had to make a communal effort to work with each other and to connect with each other in order for the piece to stand on its own.
Working with foam board was not entirely a whole new medium for me. I’ve worked with foam board in the past and on other projects, however not in the way that we had during this project. This project involved a lot more complex construction techniques including slot joints and box joints to connect the pieces together. The challenge of this project that I found most difficult was to avoid using hot glue because hot glue was a tool that I found very natural to use in most of my projects, but here we were not allowed to. Another thing I found challenging in this project was making the individual pieces that make up the Eiffel tower. I’m not good at math or measurements by any means, so I found this to be a challenge, but I think I made it work quite well.
For my final piece, I chose to use the laser cutter as my medium because I really wanted to capture the intricacy of the Eiffel tower and the laser cutter was capable of creating etchings on my chosen material. I first chose the laser cutter because I thought it was going to be much easier than hand carving wood. In some regards, I was right and in others, I was very wrong. I’ve never made an illustrator file for the laser cutter before, so I was concerned about how I was going to carry it out with all the correct notch measurements, considering I’m also not the best at math. I attempted the first cut with craft plywood to see if my measurements were done correctly. After the cut, I determined all the mistakes to the measurements, fixed them, and then set-up the file again to be printed on transparent plexiglass. I was disappointed to find out, however, that my measurements actually didn’t work on the plexiglass, so I had to go back to my original idea of using the craft plywood.
In the end, I think my sculpture was a success and demonstrates the theme of the community very clearly. Even though the plexiglass didn’t work out, I’m still happy with how my Eiffel tower came out especially with the etchings that I designed on the sides of the tower. If I were to do this project again, I would have tried to make the measurements more accurate to work with the acrylic plexiglass.
