Dreaming

Post for January 28th:

I have this space inside my head. I see it everything while I am laying in bed. I can't seem to get away from it. It is an older house, and I am walking through it. The furniture is minimal and everything is shaded gray and gloomy. There is no one home, but there is the feeling of recent inhabitants. As I continuously walk throughout the house I realize that inhabitant is me. Although this is a home I have never lived in, the remnants of my past and current life surface throughout the house in the form of nests. There are some in the cupboard, in the fridge, some are on the mantel, on the windows, the closet, the shower drain, or tucked in a corner underneath my bed. Some nests are repeated out of the same material, but in different forms, providing an overwhelming realness to my experiences. Others are singular in their make-up, but just as powerful when I encounter them. Some are large, that I can fit into, while others range to be as small as the palm of my hand. This home, this giant nest made for man, is using my history to provide a home for another species.

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This week I spent messing around with quite a few different materials. I have continued to collect nutrition labels and have been cutting them up into small strips, following the dividing lines on the label for each piece of information (i.e. total calories, fat grams, carbohydrates, etc.) (3 hours cutting). This is proving to be kind of a long collection process, but this is good because it is really allowing me time to think about placement or combining the labels with other materials. I want to show an element of constraint, so I've narrowed the nest construction down to either a messy-crochet wire mesh that I've been working on (3 hours so far) that I would use to weave the label strips into, or just simply using the labels alone but placing them someplace hidden (like a kitchen cabinet)... but in this case I would want an overwhelming amount to create larger nest trying to pour out of the cabinet.

I also made two other nests while breaking from the cutting, out of the stuffing from small pillow that held a bracelet my mother gave to me for Christmas (6 hours for both). This piece of jewelry was something that I wanted very badly because it symbolizes an important concern in my family; my mother has one, my sister now does too, along with other women in my family. However, as much as I initially wanted the bracelet, I have a hard time bringing myself to wear it due to the current state of my relationship with my mother. So I decided to take the pillow that held it gently in place and rip it apart. I took the inside stuffing and molded nest forms and then used pins to hold the form in place. The pins cover mostly the outside only, leaving the appearance of the soft material as the inside. However, most of the pins are placed inwards, making the nest dangerous for an animal to actually sit in.

I also... for no rhyme or reason really, just pure intuition, played around with making nests inspired by the construction methods of the Chimney Swift (4 hours). The swift attaches their nest to a vertical surface using small twigs and their glue-like spit to hold the twigs together. These birds also tend to make their nests in common areas together (multiples in one chimney) although they are said to be not that social. These nests are really unique and amazing that they can hold onto the surface under the weight of the bird. I tried to mimic these nests by pining branches onto my wall, using some metal wire as extra support, and then pouring plaster over them to harden them into place. I really like these nests in their minimal make up and fragility. I plan to make about six of these (one for each person in my family) and then smash one on the ground to see how the material and branches break after hardening. I don't have pictures of these yet, but they in my studio if you want to sneak a peak :)


This weekend I will continue to collect nutrition labels, tea bags, and other things, but also want to test out materials like wax and food peels, skins, and cores to test how to preserve perishable items.

Post for January 21:

Last weekend and this past week was spent making nests out of a "weight gain" (supplement) labels and powder. Like I mentioned in my last post, after experimenting with the labels, I thought using the actual powder as a medium could be interesting too. I mixed the powder with just a bit of water, liquitex gel medium, and Elmer's glue. This produced a nice, but very sticky, paste that I was able to work with you form shapes out of. I found that layering the paste worked best to build up the structures. However, this meant I had to wait a few hours for the paste to start hardening before I could add the next layer. But this waiting gave me a chance to make multiple nest forms with the medium. I just kept switching from nest to nest as it was ready for the next layer. I tested different amounts of water and glue that I was adding, and even tried adding yest, but that didn't really do much. I found that although the paste hardened nicely, it was hard to make some of the forms that domed upwards. For this, I used tinfoil, plastic wrap, or other materials to prop up the paste until it hardened. I also tried baking one to speed up the drying process, which worked... but it now relates too much to food and has kind of a golden brown tone to it. I like the forms the best when they dry out on their own.

Overall, I am very happy with how the nests turned out. Most are finished, however, there were two that got quit messed up from a roommates coming home late at night... so I'll have to fix or remake those two. The total time all of this took was about 7 hours, or at least I know I spent all Saturday working on them.

Tuesday I went back to the label nest and completely took it apart and started over again (3 hours). I made an inside structure, then spray glued it and started covering it with the biggest labels. The spray glue wasn't holding as well as I had hoped and was just overall very messy. I even tried sewing some of the labels on, which worked for the big ones, but then I noticed it would start messing too much with the form where the string would pull against it. So I stuck with the spray glue but used it sparingly and super glue. It looks like a nest..... but like a hand-crafted nest. It is not messy enough for my liking and looks too arts-and-craftsy. I think the problem is that the labels are so big that they aren't giving me enough room to shape the nest like I had imagined.

I need the paper/plastic pieces to be longer and skinnier... however, then I have to give up on the legibility of the labels. But I think that I am okay with that. A friend who I spoke with about the piece mentioned that I need to demonstrate "readability," but not necessarily "legibility." So I think I will try again once more for this type of nest, but use strictly nutrition facts only of the food products I eat and shred them very skinny. Thursday morning I spent about 3 hours browsing the internet on bird nests, construction, and sculpture, and came across this artist, Fiona Hall, who made various bird's nests out of shredded dollar bills... exactly how I pictured mine to look!

Anyways, I want to remake that piece this weekend, and then continue on ward to hopefully find materials to reconstruct my sheets nest and then I have been itching to make one out of tea bags and one out of pins with pulled cotton.

Nesting

Post for January 14:

So now that it has been a few days since I have begun my nest out of sheets, I have realized that the materials I used are not conducive to my piece... or to the environment for that matter. The epoxy resin still has a very strong toxic smell, making it hard to bring indoors, let alone keep working with it. Although this is disappointing, I'm almost kind of glad that it is making me start my nest out of sheets over. Now I can use this piece to keep testing on and then rebuild one that is bigger, stronger, and most of all, non toxic. I have found some products that are water-based fabric hardeners. I am hoping to have more luck with these and will be testing them this weekend. If they prove faithful, I will then start constructing a larger, more solid structure to make my nest out of sheets. I want to experiment with using both white, plain sheets, and with flowered, patterned sheets. I feel the two types speak very differently to an audience, however, I am not sure what they will say until they are constructed in the nest form.

In the mean time I am also working on constructing smaller nests out of food labels that will sit on plates. I plan to create one that consists of only the nutrition facts, one that consists out of the things that I eat now since I have a strict diet for health purposes (food labels, facts, peels, stems, seeds, etc.), one that is made out of the labels and facts of things that I was once scared to eat (comfort foods), and one that is made out of the labels from my supplemental nutrition/weight gainer drinks that I have to take every night.

I have already started on the last one I mentioned. I am about half way through. I cut all the labels and nutrition facts into strips and have been weaving them together for some time. However, it is not exactly turning out how I would like it. The walls are still very thin, even though they are layered with paper, but since paper is so flat, there is no dimension. And it also looks like it was constructed by a person, that there was too much thought put into the way it is woven like a basket. So I think what I am going to do is deconstruct it a bit, add some tissue paper, or any light-weight paper to line the inside, then spray adhesive the piece, cover it in more label strips and then from there, once it is about the proportions I want, weave and sew pieces on in certain area to give it more natural look.

As I have been making this piece, one thing that occurred to me was the possibility of using the actual powder from the weight-gain supplements to make a nest. There are some species of birds that make there nests out of mud and sand, as borrows in the ground. With the use of a liquid glue mixed in with the powder, I plan to try and mimic these borrow-nests. I think they will turn out pretty cool and am excited about the medium.

Getting back into the Groove of things

January 10, 2011

Ahh back to work. After a restful break I will be focusing my next few days on writing my thesis draft and continuing to create nests through the exploration of various materials.

Over the break I began creating another nest, out of metal again, but put it down half-way through because it was becoming too much of a jewelry piece. Luckily winter break came at the right time because I really needed to just allow myself to move away from metal working for a while to explore other options and materials.

I had the chance to do so Thursday morning and this weekend. Thursday I gathered up a ton of different materials including fabrics, wood pieces, glass pieces, plates, forks, knifes, hair from my brushes, clothes, ect.
The first nest I constructed was out of my own hair from my hair brushes. Due to a health issue I have recently undergone, my hair has been falling out quite a bit more than usual, therefore, I have a lot of it left in my brushes. Once I took all the hair from my mated brushes, I was able to easily shape a nest form that stands on its own, no glue/structure necessary. I found this fascinating and was very happy with it. However, I still would like to continue adding more hair over time to decrease the transparency of the form. This may take a couple weeks to do.

This weekend I dove into the beginnings of another nest, however, I am finding myself running into some problems. I plan to construct a large scale nest out of bed sheets, representing the comfort of home and being able to sleep in one's own bed. However, the issue I run into is that I want the sheets to ultimately be hard, or uncomfortable rather, to sit in. This is because I always reach home with the notion that I am in a place of comfort, refuge, but within a short time of actually being there, I often feel uncomfortable and want to leave again.

To achieve this "hardened" effect I began first experimenting with plaster. I covered this bowl shaped fabric chair in plaster for the underlying base of the nest, however, I moved away from this medium when it came to the sheets because of its color and obviousness to its material.

So I tried dipping the sheets in expoy resin to mold them over the base to harden. I found this technique done by an artist, Muriel Castanis, who draps epoxy soaked sheets over mannequins, and then removes the mannequins when dry to create these holy-like beings. I must further investigate this process because:
a) Even with a bucket of epoxy, it was not nearly enough for the sheets... so they are currently blotchy with epoxy spots
b) the epoxy is highly toxic with a strong smell, making it impossible to work in doors, which leads to
c) drying time is very long, especially in the cold I have noticed the sheets haven't hardened yet and its been 24 hours.

So going off of that, I am searching for a better solution or material to use to harden the sheets without making them unrecognizable as sheets.

The process of trial and error...


Anyways, after this nest I would like to move onto creating a nest that hangs (large scale), but haven't exactly decided the materials yet. I like the bed sheets as a medium, so possibly those again, but this time I don't think I want them to be hard... rather I want something inside the nest that cannot be seen from the outside, exploring the concept of discovery. I haven't figured out what yet though.