This week was vital to the development of this project; developing my ideas and the methods I would go to to execute these ideas. I also learned new techniques such as using the lathe to carve wood. I continued using the lathe this week as a potential contribution to my final outcome.
On Monday I made a prototype for one of the various floor plans I plan to construct for my final outcome. I used wood for this to practice ways of putting the walls together. I used wood glue and tacks to secure the walls to one another. I realised that I had made all of the measurements too large for my liking, so I will scale down in my future experiments. I also cut the thickness of the wood to around 0.5cm thick which make them very fragile, so I will probably make the stone walls slightly thicker so that they are easier to work with. I have decided that the narrative of each floor plan should be at least be included in my sketchbook. Although architecture is the main theme of this project, I believe the contexts of the buildings should also be included to give the rooms purpose and more meaning to the audience. I will research further to see if there are any particular meanings to the narratives and structures in my dreams for background information on the overall structure I will create - a labyrinth of impossible structure and implausible stories.
To continue making the floor plans, I prepared lots of walls that I will then coat in plaster and carve traditional looking stone designs into. I’ve decided that I will do a select few walls with different designs and sizes and then make moulds from them using the Vac Form. This will save lost of time from trying to carve each and every wall as well as allowing me to experiment with different materials, For example, I would like to try pouring glass wax into the plastic moulds to make a wall from glass wax. I would like one of my floor plan layers to be made from stained glass, so this would be a good stepping stone to building ‘glass‘ walls. I wanted my interest in glass to come through in this project. The pop of colour from the glass could make the piece more exciting to look at.
Making sure that I keep up with the experimentation, I learned how to use the lathe and carved a few plinth/candlestick like structures. This traditional look would contribute to the juxtaposition between old and new ways of working that I hope to combine in my final outcome. It would also help to further distort the silhouette of my final piece which I intend to be a depiction of a combination of Cubism and brutalist architecture. It was a method that I thoroughly enjoyed and loosely reminded me of throwing clay on a wheel. I could see the pieces progressively getting more sophisticated and daring as to how thin I would make the post as I went on.
if I have time during the rest of this project, I would like to use measurements of the different floorplans I have drawn since the start of this project and use these to create a Print design that uses these measurements between each indents/curves. This would then make an explicit connection between the floorplans and the structure of my intended final piece.
