3D, week 10

After a long discussion of the difference - or rather, the overlap - between monuments, memorials, and public art, we brainstormed on two dichotomous qualities: masculine-feminine and organic-manmade -
After lunch, out with the worksheets, jotting down thoughts on one of these pairs, trying to give those thoughts form. I came to focus on two things - roundness and inter-relatedness - that I see as feminine qualities. How could this work in 3D, and what would the surface be like - could it carry a further message? Perhaps it could be a puzzle, where you had to clip the right shape into the right place, and tone or colour could be the key to that; or, words could continue from one shape over to the other, mother's wise words for example -

As I've been thinking about family a lot recently, this segued into depicting a "family tree" - round shapes for the women, straight shapes for the men. At first I thought the individual families could be kept separate, joined with strings perhaps; and probably the conventional shape, with the earliest ancestor at the top, then spreading out with more people in subsequent generations below, influenced my thinking -

but when it was actually made, it turned out a bit different*. Using the materials available, here's the (rough) outcome, the family tree with my grandmother at base - her two daughters had no children, her sons did - and of their children, only the girls had children, all of those sons, none of whom have children (yet). Perhaps it looks more organic-manmade than masculine-feminine?

On the way home I stopped at the 3-storey art shop in Islington to buy an A1 portfolio, then discovered the "joy" of carrying it (my arms are just that bit too short for it to clear the ground).

*That difference between my working drawing and the outcome makes me wonder about artist-artisan collaborations -- how much is laid out in the drawings/instructions, how much is actually an outcome of the collaboration, if the artist isn't familiar with the material being used and problems have to be resolved? Is the helper just a pair of hand, or is their brain important too?