Meeting up with the rest of my group has been difficult since the Easter holidays so have been continuing with experiments I started over Easter, based on the discussions we had before the break.
Before Easter we had established a concept of layers of Hulme and agreed on a multi-layered picture/sculpture. Using this I tried out three simple samples.
First was the most basic representation of our concept. Using acetate set in resin I built up a block that showed different views of Cavendish street chapel from Hulme.
As a sample I think this was a success and has turned out very useful so far in starting to finalise what we want to achieve. It has come out as a nice object that people enjoy picking up and viewing from different angles. The use of only black in the acetate creates an effective ghostly feel. I would love to experiment with different angling of the acetate so that it isn’t just parallel to the main surfaces of the block and you could view the picture through multiple faces at one time.
However the problem lies with the scale of the object. For the final piece we would want something much larger and we may want to project through the block. There would be many problems with using resin in something much larger than my sample. First would be the price of creating such a large block. It would also have to be a lot thicker because you could not get the true sense of depth in the picture in the sample. Although the price of materials is important to consider, the biggest reason I’d advise again resin for our piece would be the time consuming task of polishing the surfaces. It took at least 4 hours to get the main sides clear enough to see thought them. On a much larger block the increased surface area would make polishing it impractical.
The other two samples I did over Easter were more of a twist on our concept. I wanted to see how the changes that have happened in Hulme could be represented in different ways, rather than just flat layers one in front of the other.
My favourite was the map. As I have said before, the crescents are a part of Hulme’s history that I find particularly interesting. While I was trying to figure out where the crescents used to be in relation to present day Hulme and what I noticed is that it still seems to be made up of smaller ‘crescents’ of apartments and houses. I wanted to highlight this by isolating the individual groups to make up a kind of jigsaw of the area.
The material I used was a material I’ve used a lot in the past called Shrink art. I used it purely because it’s what I had at home an I like the thickness of the finished thing and the way marker looks on the surface when it is shrunk because it creates very crisp clear lines. The only problem is predicting how much the picture will shrink down so I wasn’t happy with the final size but it looked really good layed on the original map I traced it from so you could see the difference in scale.
I would like to do the same with older maps and experiment with laying the pieces on present maps or pieces layered up on top of each other to see how the area has changed.
The final sample I tried was supposed to be the four crescents standing together. I wanted to see how I could make the pictures in our project more 3d. Unfortunately because I used shrink art again I had some problems. I didn’t want the final crescents to be too small so I drew them quite large but during the shrinking process, due to the size, they became entangled and although I managed to flatten one out, I was unable to save the rest.
By the time I shrank the second crescent I knew I couldn’t make them turn out as I had planned so instead I made each of them become less and less screwed up. All together they could represent how the crescents became more damaged and broken as time went on.
What I found most interesting about this sample wasn’t the final out come (even if it had worked as I planned) but was the drawing of the crescents. I used pictures as reference and I tried to draw four simplified buildings. I started off being quite careful with my drawing but by the time I got to the fourth I was sick of drawing the exact same thing over and over. I noticed my self cutting corners to speed it up. I couldn’t help but think, ah they all look the same, it won’t matter if I start missing out details and turn it into a simple pattern. In a way it made me think of the way corners were cut during the actual building of the crescents just to make them faster and cheaper to build. Perhaps if they had been less plain and uniform, more care would have been put into the building, just as if they had been more interesting to draw I would have taken more time.
Laura Simone Scott 