Why

For the past week I have thought more about the layout of my final piece, as well as the size of the 31 sculptures. I worked out that they can be 4.5 cm³, whilst still retaining a 3 cm gap between each sculpture. The 3 cm gap is important, as it allows room for the viewer to easily touch and see each individual sculpture. The size of the different pieces is also important because I only have a 4 foot by 8 foot piece of wall to display my work on. If I realised half way through the making of the final piece that I wasn't going to have enough room for all the sculptures it would be incredibly distressing and I would have to start over. During this process I also experimented with the layout in real life, displaying some experimental sculptures on a board to see if the 3 cm gap was enough, as well as checking to see if the layout was aesthetically pleasing to look at. I did this so that I wouldn't be surprised by the size of the in between sides of the sculptures when I came to making the final piece.

I also began to design a leaflet for the final show, containing images of my other final pieces that I have created throughout the foundation as well accompanying text talking about the individual works. This would be a way of giving viewers a better understanding of my work in general, as well as a detailed view of the different pieces of work that I've created in the past.

During the week I also looked at different colour associations, thinking about what different people think and feel when they look at specific colours. I did this to widen my own views on colour as well as to see what other people think. During this time I read segments of different books by John Gage (Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism) and Josef Albers (Interaction of Colour). Through reading these I decided that I would keep the colour association personal to myself, rather than attempting to be understood by my audience. I decided on this because every person sees colours different anyway, and there is no correct or average way to see. This is in spite of the fact that when I first introduced colour to the work it was to help the viewer understand the different emotions easier. I feel that the colour has been fully embedded into the meaning and aesthetics of the work, and is not only there to aid the viewer, and that's why I'm choosing to keep the use of colour within my artwork.

During my tutorial today I was confronted by the fact that I constantly forget to write down in this blog why I do certain things concerning my work, this is something I obviously do think about and that is evident in my sketchbooks, but unfortunately I usually neglect to write why I do things here. I intend to do this from now on as it's important for me to repeatedly consider why I do certain things in my practice.

Today I continued to experiment with affecting the wood, trying out the designs for the different emotions that I thought about last week. This was an interesting and helpful process as it's showing me what does and doesn't work.

I continue to document my emotions every day using excel, even though I have accumulated over a months worth of emotions. I feel that it has become a regular part of my day and think that I may keep going with this process, as it's interesting to reflect on how I have felt over the course of the day. It also has meaning within the project, how ones emotions are on-going, and don't just start or stop whenever one wants them to. I have also started to turn the data into graphs.