A Mindful Break

Post for November 11:

Cathryn Barmon

Bio-accessories, Ben Landau and Brittany Veitch

Anastassia Elias

Annalisa Vobis

This week was used for a bit of a breaking point as we took a group trip to UMMA and I focused mainly on my Grant Proposal and setting up a time line for myself. The trip to UMMA was a great way to clear my head a bit and look at other works to expand my view of possibilities. The ideas and concepts expressed the Museum pieces portrayed a true sense of dedication, commitment, passion and creativity... all of which are aspects I employ in my own work. By viewing these characteristics in an other's work besides my own, I realized I am capable of anything at this point and should not be afraid to reach for the stars when it comes to materials, concepts and forms. With this, I am now fully charged and excited to do dive in and explore a variety of materials and processes to construct my pieces in a manner that will satisfy my highest expectations.

As far as what work was done this week, I spent much time on the Grant Proposal (5 hours), which included making a detailed schedule for my self with deadlines for model making, gathering feedback, construction and completion of final objects and writing my thesis. This was extremely useful because it really put time in perspective for me, which was something I hadn't been paying as much attention to as I should have been before. I also spent some time doing a mind break of my own (4 hours) and looking up various artists working with smaller viewing objects and artists who recreate smaller environments. Artists I found to be most interesting were Annalisa Vobis, Cathryn Barmon and Anastassia Elias had work that either dealt with scale or the environment similar to what I am looking into. Bio-accessories by Australian designers Ben Landau and Brittany Veitch, was also a very inspirational series that I found, playing more on the idea of function. All these works are helping to lead me to new ideas to scale down my objects. I also have a meeting set up next week to speak with Yan about design and function of the objects. So until then, I will continue sketching and developing my ideas further so that after my meeting, I will be able to begin a second model.

In the midst of all this I was able to finish my first model on Thursday (5 hours). I had to go backwards a bit and break out some of the stones inside the can to fit the light source in. This caused more stones than I wanted to to fall out and I had to re-epoxy them back in afterward. Because of the reconstruction of the piece, it is not perfectly up to my standards on craftsmanship, however, it is a model, and that is what they are for. The basic ideas are demonstrated through the piece as a whole and it works very well as a first attempt. I am able to see what I like, don't like, need to change, scale down, and re-evaluate in order to move on. Overall, the model making process was very useful and for the most part, a successful tool for development.