Although I have an abundance of information and digital work for my sculpture, I am still lacking in many physically made artifacts that I can use to show my work in more realms than simply just a digital one. A maquette is required so that I can have something to physically manipulate during the presentation as well as assisting to create a clearer vision for how my sculpture would look and work if it were to be created. To begin this I have had some thoughts on how to make something that is easy to make and can clearly display the dynamic effects of my sculpture, the obvious choice is to just make an entire sphere and then perforate text into it, however, I would then struggle to make it light up and then it would remain a static object.
I have made some sketches of a concept that I think will remain both dynamic and effective.
(SKETCHES)
After these sketches, I then moved into creating the model physically, the materials used were a thick copper-plated wire to give the structure strong support but also still remain malleable as so I could adjust the wire clips to fit different sizes of paper in them. I used the spot welder for the first time as well as the concept of physically creating artifacts still being quite new to me, within my subject of Graphic Communication there is minimal need for these skills so there was a steep learning curve in place for me to create this maquette, as a result of this the aesthetic quality of the model suffered slightly. However, the functionality of the work remained surprisingly high quality.
The functionality of the maquette is quite effective and allowed me valuable insight into how my sculpture could potentially work outside of the digital realm. I felt it was extremely important to create a physically made piece for this project as it is an Artist Designer Maker based field project and I feel encouraged to step far out of my comfort zone and create something that would not normally be considered within Graphic Communication. The fact that this object exists physically allows me to easily manipulate it into different conditions and quickly gave me extra information that I had not previously considered into the function of how the lighting would work within my sculpture.
Something that I quickly realised was that the further the light source was from the perforations within the paper, the larger and then as a consequence, the more distorted the shapes or text became. This gives me important insight into how the inside of the sculpture would have to be constructed, rather than having one single large lamp placed within the center of the hollow sphere, It would perhaps offer a more dynamic finish if the text was different sizes as well as the different fonts that would be used. Or maybe if the budget permits this then there could be a circle of lamps within the sphere that were placed onto poles that slowly shifted forwards and backward in order to change the size of the text throughout the night so that the same person visiting the same sculpture multiple times would still have something new to view for many times upon viewing the work.
The model is able to rotate so I can achieve different angles, allowing me to accurately represent a sphere with a piece of paper too large for the clips so that a natural bend is achieved within the paper so that while the maquette is being rotated along a single axis, the different view of the sculpture can be achieved.
Overall I think this work is executed to a lower standard than expected, but it still functions in the way I want it to, and it allowed me to become introduced to many new creative techniques that exist within the welding and Maquette creating realm. Future improvements would be to sand down and round off all the edges of the copper wires as well as ensure to take more time and straighten out all the wires so that I can achieve a more professional looking finish.
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