Boxes !

It was a bit silly missing my wood workshop induction ! However I did feel pretty ill and it was probably a good idea I didn’t use any dangerous machinery that day ! Anyway it didn’t seem to matter too much that I missed it as when I went down to Alan to ask about how to create these boxes for my sculptures he was very helpful and showed me everything I needed to do ! I didn’t realise how complicated it would be to make some boxes however ! When coming up with measurements / sizes for the different pieces of wood I needed I had to take into consideration the thickness of the wood etc ! This was a really good exercise  though and I’m glad Alan didn’t just quickly work it out for me as I feel now I could make frames / boxes with no trouble at all and I’m sure I will need to further on in my course / practice ! After I had decided how big I wanted each box and how I was going to put it together I then cut out all the pieces of wood using the band saw. I then constructed the boxes using wood glue / pins as they were only pretty small so didn’t need anything more substantial !

Now that I have made them I’m unsure what I want to do with them. I will decorate them in some way I’m just unsure on how to. They cannot be too heavily decorated as this will distract the eye from the sculptures themselves. One of the main reasons for presenting the found object sculptures in this way is to give them more significance as an actual piece of art – so they can be admired for the things that they are. Normally the objects would be just dismissed and not given a second glance. Although I have altered the objects and combined them with others to give them more visual appeal, I still think they need to be displayed in a more enhanced way to give them more presence and importance as things of beauty in their own right.

This is the problem when working in different ways. I don’t like my work to be separate. I like to combine the different ways in which I have been working. In the past this has seemed to produce some good results, however I’m unsure if combining the print pieces with the sculptures will be successful. I don’t want to try too hard to combine them just for the sake of thinking I have to, to have a final result for this project. I understand that there will always be many outcomes to a project – it’s just usually aspects from each different area I have worked in normally interweave / combine to produce a more rounded and broad end result. I don’t like how separate the printmaking work I have been producing is so different from the sculptural things I have been working on and even the drawings in my sketchbook for that matter !

I do worry too much about things like this – and things in general for that matter ! I think it would be a good idea to take everything down off my studio wall (the stuff I put up at the start for inspiration) and then start putting up the work I have been producing so I can really look at it and see were I can go from there. I know you learn new processes and techniques all the time but I don’t think I will learn anything too drastically new now that will make me want to combine that also into my work so hopefully it should now be easier to develop on what I have been doing. Rather than thinking I can develop on it then all of a sudden learn a whole new technique / process to complicate things more ! See below for the boxes I made – this was just after they were made, hence the glue around the edges!

 

   

I think I will probably end up making another sculpture just to make the series a 5 rather than a 4 !