Sunday, December 2, 2012

The Possibilities of Failure



This is a piece built for an outdoor space called the "Nook" over at the CGU art campus.  The space used to house the dumpsters for that building and when they were relocated it became a place for the installation class.  I have been scavenging from the woodshop scrap bin for a while and have been reusing it on different projects as needed.
This piece is a result of the idea of creating a line with many perpendicular lines coming off of it and then bending that line to see how it alters their curvalinear progression.  I started with creating a pair of strips of steel 24 feet long.  I took these wood scraps of mine and sandwiched them between the steel then wrapped them up nicely with some decorative threading in twine.  Added a little bit of color with some dry brush of lavender.  This line was then carried by a team of friends and myself out to the nook.  
I proceeded to bend the strip (this is no small chore, it took my entire body to get it to go) in the space.  The cotton snapped in the process of carrying out there, and while bending it into shape.  I figured it was a possibility, but did not expect it to break to the extent that it did.  Furthermore, the curves I had in mind were much bigger, so that you could walk through the piece.  It was way too heavy, and too rigid to create the image I had in my head.   
So I was forced to settle for what the piece would allow, and not what I wanted.  

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