Project Statement
This piece was created to express the feeling of knowing my photograph was published in a magazine for the first time. The planes with gradually changing colors were used to represent my progress and development in photography. At the same time, the use of yarn between each plane was decreasing, while it was becoming more organized. From my perspective, that was the process of how I explored photography – from knowing nothing to figuring out my personal taste and style. From the front view, the size of the hollow part was gradually reducing, which represents my confusion in photography: although I started to know more in photography, there were still a lot for me to explore.
Brainstorming and Developing Ideas
At the beginning of this project, I reviewed many significant events in my life. Among them, I found out that the experience of my photograph got published for the first time was the most meaningful one in terms of the impact. Back to then, I doubted the value of my work, since I wasn’t confident enough. From my perspective, my work being published meant other people gave consent to the contents and meaning within my work. For me, that helped me determine I would explore further in photography. At the same time, this experience also contributed to the development of my personal style in terms of shooting and editing.
In general, I was trying to convey the delight and proudness of that moment – seeing my photographs on the magazine for the first time. Considering the experience of learning photography was more like a journey to me, I chose the depth of the three dimensional object to represent the time span. Another element I considered was color: bright colors are always linked to positive emotions, while the negative emotions are usually associated with colors with lower brightness. So I decided to use several planes to symbolize the stages in my photography practice, and they would be arranged in the sequence of increasing brightness, to represent the altering process of my attitude towards photography – from confused to determined.
To show the connection between this piece and my path in photography, I cut out part of my previous work and added gaussian blur to them and used it as the texture of two planes. At the same time, the path was continuous; so I needed to connect each of them to make it less isolated.
Choosing Materials
Considering I would build a handmade three dimensional object, the easiness for processing was one of my primary considerations. At the same time, it had to be stable and strong enough to hold its self weight; so I chose cardboard, which also allows me to add textures on it later.
For the connection between each planes, I chose yarn, since it was easy to arrange and I could use the arrangement to show either the chaos or the sense of direction in my mind.
As I was building this object, I found out the connection was a challenge, since the yarn couldn’t support the weight of the planes made by cardboard. To fix it, another plane was added at the bottom of the piece. If I had the chance to remake it, the material for connecting each plane would be reconsidered.
