26 November 2009

Core studies week 10

After a pep-talk about our upcoming assessment, and about those applications for BA courses, we got on with our own work, mine being developing "little houses". Here are some I prepared earlier - much earlier - maybe 10 years ago...
A handful of "those useful coffee-stirrer sticks" and some stitched squares that happened to be in my bag led to this arrangement of "safe houses", with floods in mind -
My bag also had some handmade paper I'd prepared much earlier - it quickly made a little city on a riverbank -
To make windows in the houses, I painted the shapes with water, then pushed through the wet paper with the tip of the brush and picked away the wet bits -
These are looking a bit like houses in Yemen -
Another way of adding detail was to stitch some windows - much more time-consuming and less successful; needs a darker thread, perhaps?
My next excursions developed the idea of connecting doors. The look of concrete is obtained by frottage - with the side of a graphite stick over a strip of paper lying on a paint-spattered table -
Positioning the doors, and the direction they open, has lots of possibilities. And folding the paper in various ways - as well as adding windows - makes for too many possibilities! I have to have a rethink of what I'm actually aiming at.
Printing with the folded-paper strip makes for a rather labyrinthine house-plan - more like a village.
Next I'll look at some non-western buildings, and plans of archaeological sites, to see if they add to my theme; they may not be directly relevant, but I'm always on the look-out for serendipity.

1 comment:

PaMdora said...

These little houses are so interesting, I love the peek-a-boo effect and the three dimensional ways that you are playing with them. Is this for a 3d design core class or some other project?