Sandpaper

For the past few days I have been thinking a lot about the meaning behind the sculptures that I'm going to create for this project, and the best way to communicate my emotions through them to the viewer.

I've been having lots of ideas about opposites. Looking at how if I affected a piece of wood in one way to reflect an emotion and then did the opposite effect to another piece of wood, whether that emotion would be the opposite of the original emotion, for example love and hate. I would like to look into this further, by thinking about how this would work for a range of emotions as well as by creating some sculptures to see whether the idea works on an aesthetic level too.

Today I was also considering creating a month's worth of emotions conveyed through simply sanding down 30 or so pieces of the same sized wood. Representing how life just blends into one pointless journey that you can only slightly remember significant parts of. In this piece the wood blocks would be sanded down in a variety of different ways, some more memorable than others.

I also had thoughts about how the sanding process could be used to transform the wood blocks into different shapes, with each new shape representing a new emotion. Emotions could also be shown by how sanded down each wood block is, for example, the smaller the wood block the worse you are feeling on that particular day. These two ideas could also be blended into one by sanding the wood into shapes, and then making the shapes smaller or larger depending on the strength of the emotion on that particular day.

I am yet to fully decide on the meaning of the sanding, and whether or not the sanding down of the wood will become the whole project or just an aspect of it. This is something I will continue to think about.