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.