-Project Intro-
This assignment asks us to visualize our common fear into a handmade monument with the least height of 3 feet. We are asked to place it to somewhere special that fits its meaning and express our fear within the piece.
-Background-
After chatting within the group, we found out that all of us is afraid of fire. None of us reach the level of pyrophobia, but we all feel dangerous or uncomfortable to get close to the fire. Our group members have different reasons for our fear: some are because of their own experiences, some are because of the lethality of fire itself. Thus, to make it less frightening, we chose three angles to express and alleviate our fear: face it, shift the focus, and take precautions.
Therefore, we choose to make a Chinese traditional sky lantern which people make for the Lunar Festival and other vital festivals. its graceful outlook and light can shift our focus from scary fire to the beauty of the whole piece. Besides, we decided to burn paper to face our own fear and to blend in some elements about water into this piece:
Rough Draft Sketches
-Process-
We split our jobs into raw materials and boxes making. Nancy and I are responsible for manufacturing raw materials. We started with the manufacture of raw materials: twined metal wire, metal wire circle, wood support columns, and metal sheet cutting.
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- Pull it out of the pencil and cut it into small circles to make “necklace”
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- Twist the metal wire with driller
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- Twine the metal wire onto a pencil
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- Cut the metal sheet using OLFA knife
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- BOOM!
After these procedures, we started to stick our basic materials onto the wood structures to make the basement:
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- Cut the wood sticks after using wood cutting machine into 45 degree edges
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- Connect them with glue gun and add our metal sheet cuts onto the wood structure
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- Finished, with Jessica and Jain’s metal wire boxes installed
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- Connecting wood pieces to the base
After making the basement, we started to do the upper part: the Sky Lantern
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- Use metal wire to make the structure
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- Use Chinese calligraphy paper to wrap the Sky Lantern (made some paper cut of fire)
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- Product pictures taken at the entrance
After that, we also made some decoration for the whole pieces: paper pieces with spells on it and the chain to represent the fire is latched and will not do anything to harm us.
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- Me 🙂
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- Chains and the paper cut
-Styling Pictures-
After days of work, we finally went to our selected location to take styling pictures.
We chose the platform in front of the Manayana Buddhist Temple located in Chinatown. We choose that position for its sacredness. What we are making is a based on the idea of sky lantern which is extended from our common fear, fire. Due to this reason, putting this monument close to a sacred religious site can help exhibit its sacredness while this site is right on the bank where Manhattan Bridge is built. With sacredness of the temple, the whole piece of ours turns to be more monumental (the sky lantern is designed for religious use in great festivals); with the Manhattan Bridge in sight, people will imagine water is near, which represents a solution to our common fear—fire.
It was so windy that we have to block the wind using our body:
These are the videos introducing our working experiences in detail:
-Reflection-
This bridge project really challenges our responsibility as a group and our collaborative consciousness. I have heard lots of groups were having collabroative or communicative problems. However, our group is really lucky and I had 3 really reliable and cooperating teammates. We made the projects with our full attention and effort for days. I really appreciate what we have reached and hopefully I can work with them again. 🙂
