During this past spring semester, I was asked to partake in a collaborative project run by artist Nate Little. The project is this: Nate made these little "trees" and gave one to every person who agreed to participate. They had a little tag hanging off one of the branches with instructions on it. Each artist proceeded to make a house for the tree. Some people took it very literally and made houses, and did something more non-specific. I guess I'm one of the latter.
I was planning on using toothpicks woven with wire for something, but hadn't figured it out until that project came along. I was also thinking about frosted mylar because I like the look of it. In my other work, I had just started to tackle the problem of adding color without the color implying something. This project wound up being the perfect platform to experiment and find solutions for all these problems. I think the collaborative nature of the project where there is only a partial ownership of the work and the idea helps take the pressure off, along with the fact that Nate made 30 trees (about) and so if mine wasn't good it didn't matter because there would be so many others to look at.
The results are shown here. I plan to take this back to my own work by running with the woven toothpick idea. I am doing more of it, using thin (31 guage) steel. I like the idea of scaling it up, using wooden chopstick or something similar along with toothpicks. After I have made a fair amount of these I will need to tackle the problem of installing them in a space. (I'm not ready to think about that yet.) Since using the mylar in this piece I have figured out a different way to approach working with it. This project served as a way to break the ice between me and mylar :)
