Final work and evaluation

 

Wire and ink stained cotton wings.

Goat Skull with Victorian poison bottle

and used matchsticks.

Photography experiments capturing the golden, late afternoon sun light with Skull, bottle and leaves.

Physical Sketchbook
A time line of my idea process.

Essentially my work is an exploration into the human relationship with nature.

It investigates the way we collect and document nature, the way we seek to control it, the way we take joy from it and also the sadness in killing something that we love by the need to posses it.

There is a ritualistic element to collecting and arranging and assigning value or certain properties to objects, trinkets or trophies. Memories/ mementos.

The objects in this box are my personal objects collected over the years with my son and hold special memories and meaning to us. They are also quite universal objects associated with sea side holidays and autumn foraging that will hopefully evoke similar memories for the veiwer as well.

The dragonfly sculpture with the human mask is about our need to humanise nature and the fantasy element of nature that inspires the creation of mythical creatures like fairies.

The finding jar full of leaves signify the act of trapping nature and is inspired by the poison jar from my reaseach. The skull and poison bottle with burned matchsticks are again about the capture and death.

The wings and the leaves on the wall are part real and hand made and represented the ethereal aspect of nature.

The objects were selected or made with a natural history aesthetic in mind and their symbolic meanings. I used natural materials to keep the organic thread running throughout. The colour pallet is subdued, highlighted by the blue poison bottle and blue wings.

The labels are purposely verbs to indicate an ongoing process of finding and keeping.

And the title label is curiosity in reference to curiosity cabinets and the curious relationship between humans and nature.

Evaluation.

I think as a piece of work it's visually coherent and works with my theme. I chose a collection of items to display as the experimental nature of the project with the introduction of so many techniques and processes gave me a lot to work with so I wanted to incorporate these elements into the final piece.

Given more time I may have made more boxes as I was torn with the idea of presenting the sculture in parts inside the Box or having a box of handmade items.

I would have like to develop the dragon fly sculpture a little more beyond this crude prototype, it was meant to look unreal and a bit sinister.

I was in two minds about the word labels. I used hand written calligraphy to keep an antique look and was thinking of labeling all the items as verbs but was worried it would be overkill and better to leave something to the imagination.

I'm pleased with how the box turned out as a mixed media, asambalge work It does have some decorative elements to it, I was hoping to get a museum aesthetic so wanted it to be quite formally arranged.

I definitely spent more time on experimentation stage than the final piece and that experimentation led me miles from my original idea of autumn leaves in a really freeing way. I surrendered myself to the process in this case.