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Year One - Sculpture Fine Art

Sculpture – Houses Project

‘As part of your project work this Term you will be investigating the enclosure and creation of space by materials – this is common to architecture and sculpture. We are all ‘housed’ in bodies and spaces. To start your investigation you will be making a range of ‘boxes’ – small enclosures. These can develop in all sorts of imaginative ways. Take a look at the images here as a stimulation to thinking about how enclosure, structure, materials, divide up, surround and create the spaces we need, enjoy, retreat to, escape from: the spaces that order and disorder us.’

Project Brief

Inspiration

My inspiration behind my box creation was inspired by bees. During the morning of receiving the brief I was randomly having a discussion about honey and then I saw this yellow recycled plastic, the combination of which inspired me to focus upon a beehive. Reflecting the symbolic shapes, colours and simplistic symbolism of the bee in their habitats.

Sample Sculpture Creation

To create this practice sample I started by cutting out six honeycomb inspired hexagons. I was going to originally form a hexagonal prism but then realised I had formed the majority of the net wrong so I decided to play around with the hexagons I had already cut out, with formed a very abstract formation which I was very pleased with.

Hexagonal Prism

So I unintentionally had a happy accident, in regards to not researching before creating but it worked out well as I formed a more unique creation. That overall helped to reflect the idea of ‘confinement’ which I was trying to reflect within my structure.

Confinement within Structures

Confinement (noun)  

the situation in which a person or animal is kept somewhere, usually by force

Cambridge Dictionary Definition

I wanted to reflect confinement within my structure, to express how bees are being forced into an enclosure we create for them as human beings. To gain from them rather than nurture their habitats. By creating this box reflecting a bees habitat, I hope to bring light to the confinement we put upon these beautiful tiny creatures as well as the moral implications of exposing the bees to ‘diseases and parasites, such as deformed wing virus and varroa mite’.

Creating my Box

When creating this template I started by drawing guidelines for making the shape, I them measured the main lines to be 6cm in length. However, two of the sides was measured too long so I had to adapt the scale to form my final adaptation of the template which I then transferred onto wood.

After I transferred the template size onto the wood I clamped this too my working area and began to cut the shapes out with a wood jigsaw.

I then drew around the random sides of my practice sample to form the extra pieces of my wooden box.

To form the construction of my box I purchased this all purpose glue to adhere the sides together. However, this didn’t work well, due to the angle of the sides the glue was not strong enough to support this design as well as taking a long time too dry. As a result, I decided to try using a hot glue gun. This worked well and enabled me to adhere the sides together in the desired angles.

After all the sides where adhered together in the desired form, I cut off the excess glue on the edges with a craft knife and used hand held wood files/ sand paper to smooth the corners. Yet on certain edges I could not smooth to desired affect due to the placement of the sides being internal from the others, so I applied filler to create a more seamless blend. I then sanded away the excess filler and began the painting process.

Smoothed Box

I decided to paint the box yellow to reflect the simplistic symbolism of the cartoon honeycomb yet used details reflected from the natural formation of honeycomb to bring some reality to my sculpture.

Final Enclosure

https://www.polyhedra.net/en/
https://images.google.com
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/confinement
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beehive
https://theconversation.com/keeping-honeybees-doesnt-save-bees-or-the-environment-102931

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