Sculpture Project 1: Cardboard

For our first project in Sculpture, we were given the guidelines:

1. You must create a sphere that is exactly 12" wide
2. It must be able to roll down a ramp
   and
3. You can only use corrugated cardboard

We were given a quick demonstration on how to create a variety of different joints using cardboard and then let loose.

Using three different types of joints I proceeded to make three maquettes (a sphere, a cube, and a triangle) in preparation for my sphere. I was originally planning on doing a sphere that was essentially a cage, with said maquettes inside as a nod to the process of creation but after looking at these objects, I decided to do something completely different.

Instead, what I based my sphere on was the concept of creating the illusion of three dimensional space using a two dimensional form by spiral cutting two circles and then expanding them out like an accordion. Unfortunately, in my smaller shapes I forgot to take into consideration that thinner longer pieces of cardboard tend to suffer significantly in the realm of structural integrity and so I had to add a large number of elements to make the piece even physically viable.

That said, this is what I finally ended up with:



And in case you were wondering: It was a little too wide and almost made it down the ramp (which was about 14" wide)

House of Cards

This semester, the art class that I find myself taking is ARTS 049: Visual Processes: Introduction to Sculpture. I am really excited about this because it will give me the opportunity to work in 3-dimensional space, in a media that I have been really excited about for a long time, but have never actually tried to work in.

I will still be taking photographs and printing silkscreen in the coming months, but most of my creative efforts will be dedicated to this new class and new medium. Our first project (more of a fun, one-off sort of thing, that an actual project) was to build a house of cards; the results are listed below.

This is what I created:

No, not really.

When I first got the deck (it was brand new) I decided I wanted to make this elaborate monolith of a piece, but eventually due to certain restraints, such as the fact I must live and work in reality, this idea was whittled ever so slightly down to the playing card version of Versailles.

Designing this piece was relatively simple and while I could only use playing cards for the house, I was going to make the grounds and assorted wall/architecture out of other cards (Tarot, Pokemon TCG, Magic the Gathering, etc...) so I was very excited and fully prepared to set forth and accomplish the beast of a building.

Unfortunately, as these cards were brand new, they were incredibly slippery and therefore very irksome to stack 'traditionally.' After about 30 minutes of fruitless attempts to create even just two consecutive A-frames, I moved on to a more experimental method for the stacking. Armed with this new process (using two cards as support beams for a single central column) I abstracted from my Versailles idea, a one story 'version' and thus created the below house of cards.

After completing this, I did attempt to create a processional and garden with Tarot and Pokémon cards, but at this point I had been at this task for over two hours straight and I decided to give it a rest.