Cultural Self-Portrait in Tile

(Please click the pictures to view as gallery.)

For this assignment, we have to build a cultural self-portrait in tiles and to start with we need to buy birch plywood as a base material for the tile itself. After, as a class, each different individuals need to come up with ideas of how do we joint our tiles together as a class. The first picture shows my sketched of ideas for the joints and we all discussed different people’s ideas. As result, we decided to use Tetris to join each tile together, therefore we made a sample in class and recorded it down. Furthermore, to able to make the installation more fit in with the wall, we turned the tiles to 45 degrees. Lastly, our final decision on the wood joint to use a  key joint.(as seen in the ‘Final Diagram’ picture).

Process of Building the Vaults/Add-ons

As the requirement for this assignment, we have built a shelf, a window, a door, a pocket, a drawer and hidden storage in the tile. Also, we have made the key joints in the making center as well.

Final Work

My Tile

Theme/Background 

My tile’s main theme is my culture and my memories. The background that I have used is a technique I often use in artworks, which is collage. For the background, I have layered white paint to give it intensity and strong texture. If you look at the candy wraps that I have collage in the background, they are my childhood candies and it is a classic candy in China called White Rabbit; where each generation has tasted it before.  I also have put one of my Chinese name’s letter in the background and also my country’s name as well. If you look closely, you can also see chopsticks collaged in too. Moreover, I used black and red for my add-ons because it is two of my favorite colors.

Window 

In the window, I have put my high school graduation photo, where it displays me and my friends standing in front of our school’s front door.

Door

If you open the red door from my tile, you can see a picture of a bowel that is full of ingredients and a whisk. This picture was captured when I was baking. This is also one of my biggest interest too and since I don’t bake as often as before coming to university, people who are new to me do not know right away about this interest.

Pocket

In the pocket, I have put a snack called Pocky, which is one of my favorite Japanese snacks. I always buy this snack and they have many flavors and limited edition flavors that have different packaging too.

Drawer

I have put a box of ball pins in the drawer that represents my major—fashion design and it is also a medium that often appears in my artworks.

Shelf

On the shelf, I have placed my sketchbook from grade 12, which is the last year of my high school. It is really precious to me since the sketchbook are full of my ideas, planning, experimenting and art history notes from my last year of high school. It is memorable since the last year my two art courses were the final ones you choose from all courses and this sketchbook recorded all my processes of working with different mediums.

 

 

Final Installation

Going on, each of us finished our personal tile and we have joint them together on the wall. Each tile reflects ourselves’ personality or culture and we have different items on the tile to represent ourselves.