Sculpture 3

Continuing with our "box projects" in the morning. (Love those ducts snaking across the room.) Quick tidy-up after lunch and then it was time to see and talk about them all. We had to decide which of the six words applied: secrecy, claustrophobia, expansive, treasured, labyrinth, theatrical.

I couldn't choose just one of the pieces (too many ideas, half-realised - there's a message there) so decided to combine them in a variant of the Shell Game:

Under one cover, Pandora's box - open the lid and all the evils fly out, but Hope stays. This was a recent idea - it hit me about 12.10 - and the least successful (but the most theatrical). There are elements of secrecy and treasured in it too -

The one green "nose" in the crowded box of fish prompted a lot of speculation - "is it still alive?" - but it's there simply because I didn't check carefully that all had been removed. The comment that it looks like a mass grave kinda puts you off eating sushi - but that does come close to my intention - claustrophobia (and the opposite of "treasured"). The fish piece was born in the office last week as the empty box went into the wastebasket - I looked at the half-empty soya sauce fish and wondered how fish felt once they hit the air - gasping for breath the way people do when panicked, to no avail. Had to rescue the box - and have more sushi as soon as possible, to get another. Fortunately there were plenty more fish at home, saved up over the years. Having just the one fish in the one box would give a different reading. As would lifting one of the lids.

The final object was hatched at about 12.45, when my quick, easy system for making a folded box didn't actually work (less haste needed) -- so the intended nice, neat box turned into a larger, longer object - the extra sides could have been enclosed (secrecy) but as I'd run out of time I left it loose and went for "expansive" -

This proved very hard to photograph - the camera wouldn't automatically focus on it, maybe because there's not actually any edge or contrast in the middle to focus on. I love the semi-transparency, and the feel of the paper, and how crisp the folds can be.
Only one person had given their piece a title - perhaps we all wanted to make the guessing game harder? I like having a title in mind at the outset; it focuses the piece. Having the six words in mind didn't work the same way.

Another thing most of us needed to make clearer was the intended scale of the piece. Though it's the end of the project, we obviously still have a lot of "work in progress".