Recycled Transformations

On the 9^th of December 2010, year 9 put on their first exhibition and it was a real success. Every student taking art GCSE in year 9 produced at least one piece using recycled materials. These materials ranged from tin cans, old toys and books to crisp packets, broken glass and even bandages. One unique and individual use of recycled materials was a dog sculpture made out of tea bags. This was effective because the proportions were accurate and every inch of the piece was covered in teabags of different shades of brown. Many people did dresses using crisp packets sewn together which looked very professional.

Another of my style of pieces was a 2d creation using the tape from inside a cassette. The students both made a face of celebrities by sketching the design onto a piece of cardboard and then covering the pencil lines in tape. I like the final touch they both added by putting the cassette they had used onto the final piece.

Our project from the past term has been very fun as well as being environmentally friendly. Instead of having sketch pads, one class used blogs which they could easily access on our minibooks to record their work. This enabled the teacher to comment on the work throughout the process of planning and creating pieces. The topic has also taught us that materials which would be thrown away can be made into something effective.

Evaluation of final outcome

To conclude the topic of recycling, we all made a final piece for an exhibition showing on the 10th of December. Unfortunately I was unable to bring a camera into school so the quality of the picture isn't great (I used the mini-book camera).

Final piece

My final piece reflects the class work we did with book art and 3D projecting form. For this reasons, the artists which inspired me were the ones stated in my '3D projecting form' post. Sachiyo Yoshida inspired me for the bursting-out-of-the-pages effect and I think that it adds a nice, animated touch to the piece.

Using the collaging skills I learnt in the 3d projecting form topic, I used newspaper to create the basic structure before covering it with pages from the book. I did this for both the branch and the bird, using a reasonable amount of glue to make it strong. I attached the separate structure to the book by drilling a hole halfway through the book and fixing it in place with PVA glue which was surprisingly effective. In my original idea, I planned to collage colour pages from magazines to add more interest but as advised, I stuck to the black and white colour scheme. I think that this is effective because it is very simple, subtle and not too bold.

I found it quite hard to get the proportions right on the bird and next time I would spend more time researching how to get the shape more accurate. For my Marquette homework, I decided it would be too hard to make a miniature version of the whole piece so I just made the bird. from this I already knew it was going to be hard so I improved my method slightly by making the newspaper structure under the collage more smooth.

Clay Demo

The clay is of a plastic consistency whereas when it was originally got out of the ground, it would have been a lot dryer, all that they have done is add water. This was one description that i found on bottle slumping. " Many people also use the word 'fusing' to include bending and shaping using the heat of the kiln. This manipulating can take many forms, but the most common is 'slumping', where a mould is used to cause already fused glass to take on the shape of a bowl, a plate, or a similar object. 
After research, I would define bottle slumping as " shaping a bottle to look like a certain design or purpose, whether it be a kitchen utensil or a piece of art."


These are the instructions for making our bottle slump mould:


Equiptment:
Rolling pin       knife       mat       fork       pot of water     clay


Instructions, step by step
1) Cover bottles in paper towels.
2) Flatten clay using the palm of our hand. Keep turning it over and repeat process until it is even (1cm thick)
3) With a knife, trim the edges
4) Get two scrap pieces of clay and put them either side of the bottle to stop it rolling.
5) Drape the clay over the bottle and shape delicately.
6) At 4 points rough the clay up (crosshatching) with a fork
7) Put 4 'feet' onto the mould, crosshatching them before hand
8) Attach the 'feet' to the mould using a small amount of water. The 'glue' is called the clay slip.
9) Curve the ends of the mould up and initial them.
10) leave the mould to go bone dry.
11) Fire into kiln at 1,110'c

Magazine Flowers

Using a single sheet of a magazine, we rolled it up to make a long, thin tube. We then got another sheet and cut lots of slits into it. When we rolled it up it resembled a flower form. We then placed this into the top of our long roll, creating the stem.

Introduction to Bottle Slumping

Bottle clumping is a fun way to create gifts and/ or kitchen plates (as seen above). As well as being cheap, it is a fun way to recycle.

In order to make your bottle slump into a certain shape, you have to make a mold, usually out of clay. In the next post i wil state the steps to make a clay mold and later on, i will record my finished, slumped bottle.

This bottle has been molded to the shape of the biscuits creating an effective, echo friendly biscuit.

Relief form

My attempt

Inspired by Cara bearer (see below) our art work this week was on relief form. held together originally by paper-clips, the twists of the magazine strip were glued together and in my case stood up to create an effective piece. It took a lot longer than I expected and I was quite pleased with the final outcome. I managed to vary the size of the spirals and I could see the connection with Cara's work.

This was were our  main inspiration came from (Cara Barer's work):

Whirligig

Journey to Zaragoza

The thing I really like about Barer's pieces is that she made a simple, everyday object into an original piece of art. In Journey to Zaragoza, as well as liking the formation of the piece, I think that it is a really clever use of materials; the maps linking to the title of the piece really well.

I love her pieces. I think that they create a real atmosphere with the spirals of the pages. I could have improved my piece by making it more secure because at this current stage, it is quite flimsy. To make it more secure, I could have put a bit more glue. Or, to make it more professional, I could use wax like Cara Barer does. Given the opportunity, I would mount my piece on a black wall to create the floating effect Barer manages to create. 

3D projecting Form

Progressed into...

(almost finished)

Finished
 (not the best photo/angle but I had trouble uploading the others)

This is the starting stage, almost finished and finished stages of my 3d projected form. After making the base out of newspaper, we started to cover it with some pages from the back and front of the book. As in the 2D projecting form, we brainstormed some ideas in the front of the book, relative to the theme, cats.


I chose the sleeping cat as my form because the book is about a small kitten getting lost in the snow and at the very end of the story, there is an illustration of a cat curled up in a basket in front of a fire. I thought that this summed the book up quite nicely so that is why I created this 3D form. If you look very closer, you can see some of the key phrases from the book, on his face there are more, smaller phrases. For example; lost in the snow, animal rescue, the unwanted kitten and safe by the fireplace.


The pieces influenced me with the amount of detail they included and i only really  realised how hard it is to create that amount of detail when I tried it four myself.

Pieces which inspired this work:

As I previously commented, I like the way the goat is coming out of one page and eating the next. Now that I have done a piece in the similar style, I appreciate how hard it is to create a piece this precise and with this amount of detail.