Site or Sight

There is a playful conflict in my work, which has become a more muted examination of nature’s sublime majesty, brought to the foreground by unnatural materials and forms within this latest project.

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Artist’s Book “Connections”

Following on from Linescape and considering some of the same themes, “Connections” is an artists book with a sense of discovery and playfulness. Each disc or ‘page’ is 15cm across making this book very large and weighty. This brings an earthy, grounding element to the work, which compliments the subtle links to landscapes and the natural environment.

Artist Book ‘Connections’ – 2017

Unnatural Growth

With sustainability in mind, as that was the title, I revisited balance within nature. Working with recycled materials gathered from scrap bins in the university workshops I started this project recreating some of the shapes and ideas I created before. I explored different materials and shapes formed solely through balance. The final culmination of this was “Unnatural Growth” a balanced sculpture showing the progression or digression from plank of wood to natural tree.

Origami

Having finished college, I am planning on setting myself some projects over summer, before I go off to uni. I have no idea as yet what these might be but I will begin planning shortly. In the meantime I have reverted back to the therapeutic folding of origami as a means of relaxation. There is something so satisfying about folding a flat piece of paper to create a 3D sculpture. So I dug out one of my many origami books and found some paper I would probably never use otherwise and began folding. These three pieces are modular (they use more than one piece of paper) and are very difficult to piece together. This is what makes them so fascinating to me. The process of assembling them makes me feel like I understand the geometric form better. I have often wanted to try adapting these in some way.

Origami Paper Art

Man vs Nature

This is my final piece I created for college. It took a long time to organise and collect materials for this piece as there are many components. Although in the images I edited it out, the board underneath is in two halves. It has indents for each pot. (The boards were cut by http://www.ev-rev.com) In each of the 48 pots are natural materials; 12 with charcoal, 12 with dead sticks and leaves, 12 with dandelion heads and 12 with shredded leaves. Each pot has a hand made hook which holds the wall in place, creating a dodecagram (12 pointed star). On the outer pots there are finger knitted wire loops containing the pots.

My idea was to represent the ‘balance’ between man and nature. The pots being man-made and non-biodegradable and the materials inside being natural and able to decay. The pots represent the constriction of nature and the long lasting materials we produce. On top of all of this is the geometric design, which came from my research into our need for precise shapes and forms. Everything we create seems to be symmetrical or geometric in some form, as this is where we see beauty. The geometric form in my piece is imprecise, just showing that nothing is perfect. The dodecagram has 12 points and is often associated with the star signs, the months in a year and can be broken down into the four elements.

‘Man/Nature’ – 2016

Drink Stirrer Art

I found these drink stirrers in a small craft and antiques shop and immediately knew I wanted to do something with them. The techniques I used here are the same as some of my other balanced pieces. Yet again there was NO GLUE involved in the making of these pieces. I loved working with these as they have an interesting shape to them, which is perfect for balancing. I found the shapes and pattern that they made reminded me of sea creatures of some sort.