Valerie Vanderkolk
3-D Form
Project 3 Response
Professor
April 14, 2009
01. In your own words / from your own understanding, what was the purpose of this project?
The purpose of this project was to use language as a starting point for a piece of work and also to work with wood. It is important to be able to take language (a word) and be able to translate it into a visual. We also get to spend some quality time with Walt where he teaches each of us how to take the blade out of the scroll saw.
02. Describe your work (critically, visually, and conceptually).
For this piece, I decided to use a plywood that would splinter and break better than the much more processed MDF. Plywood, which is not pressure treated will take paint much easier than the MDF because it does not have a smooth surface, it has rough surface and will be absorbed into the wood.
03. Explain the staging of your work. How is it presented to the viewer and what makes it appropriate in this context?
For this piece, I wanted to create a sense of gravity, so I staged to work to hint that the piece had fallen off of the wall and fractured on the floor. I had one single letter nailed on the wall, while the rest of the letters where either lying flat on the floor or propped up against each other, tacked together with glue. Each of the letters had been broken and wired back together with a large “staple.”
04. What terms did you find essential in maintaining a critical dialogue with the project, and…
04. how does your project make use of this vocabulary?
When I looked up the word “fracture” in the dictionary, I pulled more inspiration for the piece from the second definition which talked about the fracture of bones and I wanted to treat each of the letters like a bone which needed a pin to put it back together.
05. In what way or ways is your project successful?
The performance of reading the definition from the dictionary was very successful and people were able to guess the word without knowing the word ahead of time.
06. In what way or ways is your project unsuccessful?
The splintered could have been bigger and I wished it had won when I took it out to races last week.
07. Are you satisfied with your work?
If you were to recreate your project, what, if anything, would you do differently? If I were to recreate this project, I would break the pieces after I had painted them. I broke the pieces before I painted them, and the paint softened the fractures on each of the letters.
08. If you were to alter your work outside the parameters of this assignment, what would you do differently and why?
I would not have use a flat color, I would have painted the letters to look like bones.
09. What did you learn during the execution of this project?
I learned how to take the blade out of the scroll saw and I love Scotch. Scotch, Scotch, Scotch.
10. Do you have any personal thoughts that you would like to share with regard to this project?
When I was right out high school, I worked for two summers as an intern at Heritage Theatre Group in Grand Rapids, MI. We spent the majority of the time building scenery for all of the plays and there I first learned how to use most of the power tools we used in this project (except that most of the saws did not safety guards on them). When I first learned how to use a table saw, the scene shop foreman/ set designer told a horror story about how one of his workers in the past almost cut his fingers off while using the table saw, and then he had me cut roughly 20 different pieces for the set, after he scared the crap out me. To this day, I am still morbidly afraid of table saws and I do believe that the most terrifying thing in the world is a table saw with snakes on it.
One tool that I am glad we did not have to use in this project, is my arch nemesis, the pneumatic staple gun. Three years ago, I had to take an intro to scenery and lighting class and as students in the class, we had to work hours in the scene shop on the shows. One day, my friend Erin and I were stapling plywood around a curved plastic pool and I almost shot her with a staple, several times in a row. We’ve been friends ever since.
