Sculpture week 3

Project, theme to be decided next week: installations for the niches at the front of the City Lit building. Works will be on display for a couple of months.We look at, talk about, photograph, measure the space.
In the vitrines in the cafeteria area, this display of sewing items - rendered in coloured wire -
Back to class and our carving project. Only when I saw this photo did mine look like a sewing machine! I'm enlarging the holes -
Breakthrough!
At the end of the day, it's nearly finished - I'm thinking about whether the surface should be smooth or textured, painted or plain -

Tania Kovatz was mentioned as someone I should look up - indeed, her work is interesting and evocative. Her "tree" in the Natural History Museum is a vertical slice of a 200 year old oak tree, 17 metres from roots to branches - see it here. She's also compressed the White Cliffs of Dover into a domestic scale - see that here - "a landscape of longing, romance and something lost".

Next assignment, a relief plaque. Here's the method - making the plaque out of clay, turning that into a plaster mold, and then casting cement fondue into the mold. Clay plaque and plaster mold are destroyed in the process of making this unique item.
My object is based on this piece of modern jewellery seen in the Kunstgewerbemuseum, Berlin
It might get as big as the large drawing, or I might use the model, just put it onto a slab (with a textured background). Using it as is would be tooooo much like copying. One important technical concern is that the ball at the top must go straight down to the background, not be undercut.