After much deliberation amongst other field members, myself and multiple groups and one on one tutorials with my tutors, I have decided on a structure, a creative process and a fully formed concept for my public art piece that I will be taking forward and developing fully to a final, polished outcome.

The concept is a sculpture, and the sculpture shall be a light-based piece. I still plan on creating my work on a busy street in Cardiff, the optimum location is St Mary’s street within the city center, arguably the busiest street in the entierly of Cardiff and a street that certainly houses the most diverse amount of people. This means that creating a structure here will meet much criticism as it will be seen by a very large amount of people throughout many different periods of the day. I have created a rough sketch up of what I plan my sculpture to look like, using the design software Sketchup.

Although I have never used Sketchup before, I found the software easy to use and quick to create effective outcomes, I found the program helped me to achieve a correct perspective and proportions. This is an area I often struggle with when creating sketches, this program allowed me to create an environment where visitors are free to explore and view the structure in different lights and times, as well as viewing the environment in several different seasons.

Although I am only using the free trial version, meaning that I am limited to creating only simple structures, now that this is completed I now can go back into the workshop and, using a full version of the software where I am able to experiment with lighting and text perforation effects, this will allow me to visually view how the sculpture would be put together and how putting different letterform sizes change the effect that the lighting has along the floor and walls, making sure that the text remains legible and at correct angles.

I like the way that this sculpture looks as well as the messages around it, I think that the actual shape of the structure does need some amendments, a simple sphere doesn’t seem particularly dynamic, a sculpture of roughly this shape is required so that the text can be viewed from all angles surrounding the structure. Something similar to a plant bulb shape would be more interesting and still remain effective. For the actual materials of the structure, I think I would need to input resin or glass into the text perforations so that the public cannot throw items into the interior of the sculpture and disrupt the lighting effects. This also opens up the possibilities of altering the colour of the resin so that different colour letterforms can be thrown onto the surrounding areas. As the only time it would light up would be around the hours of 5-6am, I think that including something for those walking past the structure away from those times in order to keep it interesting. This can be in the form of a water feature surrounding the work, this will not only make it more interesting but also stop the public from coming to close in order to damage the work.

Moving forward, I think what would improve my outcome would be to experiment with more typefaces before creating the lighting, followed on by the maquette. As well as further research on the materials and rules to adhere to in terms of health and safety as well as some more potential uses for my structure.

 

After my ideation stage, I have now created a collection of varying sketches and ideas for actual sculpture pieces that I have mentioned previously within my blog posts.

Firstly the “Drunken Man” sculpture has been visualized, although only rough sketches, the size of the piece is remaining to be roughly the size of an average human, the sketches are to follow.

Project – Drawing 2

Still using a hollow interior with smaller versions of the torso placed within the inside of the first model, I think to make this sculpture more dynamic if while falling back and extending, the two other heads that appear also contain different emotions.

Another concept that I think is very strong is an idea that would be placed within the Brewery Quarter of Cardiff City Center, using the theme of the bars and pubs that would surround the work, My sculpture concept contains A large upturned cocktail bottle pouring out a liquid that spills onto the street, before bouncing back up into a stream before falling back down for one last time, the length of the work makes it easier for people to travel around it as well as the street cleaners to continue performing sanitary procedures.

Project – Drawing 2_1

The sculpture allows for extra room underneath the benches, this can be used as a makeshift shelter for homeless people late at night to protect them from rain or for other purposes. The bottle would have to be made from an extremely lightweight material as I think the only way for it to be supported would be for the actual liquid stream that extends outwards after the bottle to act as a support to prevent the structure from falling. Materials such as glass or carbon fiber come to mind however this does raise issues with the potential of the structure being extremely expensive or, if made from glass, easily broken. However, a material such as maxi glass could be used so that the bottle retained a transparent finish while also still being relatively lightweight. Although I do like this idea, It does not use much interactivity as well as it not being particularly innovative and remains quite a cliche, using a very basic item within the brewery quarter no thought is required to figure out the meaning behind it, however, it is a simple visual piece that would be enjoyed by all visitors, rather than just the industry staff who work within Cardiff City Center.

 

Research and Deconstructing the Practice of Others

After another look through the Cardiff Public Art Library, I noticed that there was s distinct lack of light-based work within Cardiff, although there are several pieces that use light as an extension of the work, some benches that have lamps underneath in order to simply illuminate the Public art pieces. So while I cannot find any inspiration within Cardiff, this does mean that there is a perfect opportunity to introduce and modernize public art in Cardiff. After exploring the Public Art Library I found that the public art within Cardiff is older looking, Metal cast sculptures and benches. While this does look effective, I think that if I were to introduce an art piece into the busy St Marys Street, it is important to attempt to make it look more modern and up to date, as the ever-changing shops and bars on the street constantly try to keep up with the most modern trends, I think that making an art piece to reflect that will help to make the outcome as effective and fitting as possible.

This raises the question of what material would be effective to use for my work, as I have mentioned that the older looking sculptures and other public art have a tendency to be cast in metal, It may be more effective to find a more modern and contemporary material to construct my large scale art piece with.

Perhaps using glass as a material would make it look more modern, matching the large panel windows that cover the front of all of the establishments across the entirety of Cardiff City Centre. More contemporary materials could include things like carbon fiber, while this would remain both lightweights, modern and structurally sound, the cost then goes up a considerable amount, this is an issue that would need to be raised when presenting the piece to clients who could potentially fund the project, If the funds are available to make the piece out of something modern at the cost of extra funding, then the work will be more effective and therefore will stay interesting and relevant for a longer time period. Another element to consider is the weather when creating a piece that will remain outdoors for potentially decades or centuries, then it is vital not to make a mistake when choosing the construction material so that rain, wind or snow will not corrode and degrade the quality of the piece over a period of time. For this reason, I do not think wood is an appropriate material or something like ceramic that I feel will be too easily broken by not only the weather but the general public, whos behavior may be unpredictable, still needs to be considered and somewhat prepared for as much as possible.

A sketch of a large scale turnable light sculpture follows.

Project – Drawing 1

 

Now that I have accumulated an appropriate amount of varied outcomes, I think that evaluating their effectiveness before choosing what to develop further.

Firstly, my concept of creating a “Drunken Man” sculpture within Cardiff City Center. The piece would be small, roughly the size of an actual human, I think this is appropriate due to potential budget restrictions, making an extremely large sculpture would risk it becoming extremely expensive, secondly the size is roughly the same size of a human makes the sculpture more believable when viewed from a distance, The work would be sculpted in some kind of metal as to give it a strong base and reduce the risk of it collapsing when interacted with. In terms of interaction, I think that the dynamics of the sculpture make it very exploratory, However, one worry is that does the interactivity of the sculpture makes it far too delicate and will, therefore, reduce the lifespan of the work far too short for it to be an effective outcome. The interactivity will, however, provoke new encounters. The work will be placed on a discreet corner in order to reduce the amount of damage done to it.

As for the interactivity, the delicacy does concern me, I do not think that the sculpture would function properly for a very long amount of time, but I still think that despite the lack of functionality its still an interesting concept that I want to explore, I think that experimenting with creating physical maquettes of the sculpture will help me see how much of the problem the interactive element of this sculpture would be if it were to be created and placed within Cardiff City Centre.

I have created sketches and thought up multiple concepts for a light-based piece, I find this idea particularly interesting due to the fact that this idea could easily contain multiple functions, one during the day and another function after nightfall. A light-based sculpture could easily be used to illuminate a dark and ominous street, this could make the area feel safer for people walking home late at night, making my work multi-purpose and therefore much more effective. I personally think this will be my most realistic outcome, as it would not be too delicate, I plan to make the structure a large bulb shape with perhaps some kind of ornament placed on the top of the structure, the words that will be cut out of the outer layer of the structure will allow light to pass through them, this will then allow the shadow of the light to be cast all along the floor, depending on the position and size of the piece, more or less space will be taken up. This work requires some further research into creating light and shadow based work in order to ensure that I fully understand that task that I plan on undertaking, this will make my work appear more realistic and therefore allows me to potentially create more layers and more effective visual metaphors within my work, while I feel I have decided on the structure of my work, I am still deciding on the actual vocabulary that will be cast out onto the large street. I think this requires more research into the surrounding area, and a slight development into exactly who my target audience is for my work in order to give me a more accurate scope for the work I will create.

 

After my initial diamond structured brainstorm, I have a collection of concepts using various different mediums and techniques, some boasting methods of interactivity and some using elements of lightings. I found that the large majority of my concepts were using a sculpture based design. I think this is due to the fact that I am usually placed within a graphic designer based concepts, while most students will normally create work themselves with their hands, I am normally restricted to a computer, so even the concept of creating something physical takes me out of my comfort zone.

I decided to push my late-night concept further, to begin with, creating a large number of sketches based around the behavior of those while perhaps, out in Cardiff on a Friday/Saturday nights or the mind frames of those people. I wanted to consider the use of time-based lighting for my art piece, perhaps something will come alive late at night, or the first rays of the sun will alight the work in a different way from that which it is viewed during the day, perhaps the piece will not illuminate much, so that once the sun fully rises, the slight illuminations will once again become invisible until the next day. This will allow those walking past my work around the times of 6am to view it in its full glory. This allows me to make the piece have multiple purposes and attitude, during the day when everyone will be able to see my work, I can make it look a certain way, however perhaps the luminescence will cast a slight shadow onto the ground, this will require further planning as I need to research the ways for a minimum amount of light to make the maximum amount of impact.

A concept within this theme could be to create a large dome-shaped sculpture with a solar charging lamp within the center of it, or Possibly a large number of mirrors in order to amplify and change the direction of any sunlight present in the surrounding area. The outside of the sculpture would be mainly hollow, with the only type left so that the light will flow from the inside of the sculpture and then display the type along the ground so that it is a large, legible shadow.

I think that the shape of the dome needs to be relevant to the message that is being displayed as well as the placement of the sculpture, I need it to be somewhere with a large amount of floor space surrounding the piece, as well as a large number of people during the day. If I am going to give the light effect more impact it seems necessary to have the piece light up during the night, so I will likely run this concept and make the text about my “Cardiff Night Life” idea.

It seems some common themes within all of my ideas are that they will take place along one of the large busy streets of Cardiff City Center. Because of this, I think that proceeding to capture photos of my space is my most effective way to move forward, further exploration of my space at different times of the day as well as different levels of people present within my chosen space. For instance, next Saturday on the 30th November there are multiple large scale events on within the city center, this would be a good time to take photos for Cardiff at its busiest, making it easier for me to tell where the majority of people go in Cardiff, what streets are most populated and where within those streets do the people naturally flow within the space. As well as a photoshoot during the night, where there are no people and the sunlight is absent from the city, this will allow me to potentially create digital mockups of the scale and position of my piece within the environment in which it should hopefully exist.

 

Being under pressure may improve creativity and concept creation, due to the individual reducing thought space on worrying about the past or thinking about the future, this allows the current, present problem to take up your full focus and allow you to think up more effective concepts to take forward.

Four P’s of Creativity;

Process

Person

Place

Product

The three vital stages of creativity are described within the LCD model for creativity are; Connecting, Listening and doing. Time for reflection is required after ideas have been created, allowing for ideas to potentially be improved and changed.

Together these form a state of being, the emotional, mental and physiological elements of a person.

Look at flow theory notes from constellation for additional, previous information.

30-minute haiku exercise

Location; HeartSpace

capture emotional and physical connections to space,

Feelings that I have within the heart space: warm, comfortable, yet unfamiliar. Low monotone hums of machinery and distant echoes of euphoric shouts. Gentle chatter is heard, sitting on the couches around the edges of the room I feel much more comfortable than when I sit on the high up and uncushioned stools within the center of the room. I feel covered and hidden by the large objects in front of me. A faint scent of confectionery and heat, it’s not neutral but is not unpleasant.

5, 7, 5

Comfort in hiding

Dull Ruptures, Eccentric Chants

A gauntlet avoided

 

Comfort in hiding

A subtle warmth, humming rounds

Jagged stares gnaw the air

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After a sufficient amount of research and thought-provoking lectures, I think that beginning to creation process will help the most to push my ideas and a general understanding of the project much further.

At the start of Level 5, Within graphics I was tasked with a project aptly named “100 Marques” we were introduced into a process called the “Double Diamond structure”.

Within the “100 Marques” project I was given a single week to execute the first half of the first diamond within the structure, giving less care to the quality of the outcomes, all 100 of them were logos for what may become my own graphics-based design company. I found this to be very useful as an activity to stimulate ideas. by making them quickly I was not being overly concerned with the quality of outcomes, but more so trying to achieve a large number of outcomes, giving me a much larger spectrum of work to analyze, annotate and look back on throughout the project. While I do not think it would be particularly feasible to attempt to create 100 ideas for this project, I certainly think it would be possible. Now that I have a strong potential theme and audience for my art piece I could draft up 20 potential sculptures, 20 potential light pieces and a portion of potential miscellaneous concepts that use mediums such as nature-based pieces or interactive works. These drafts will be firstly quickly created digitally as that is the medium in which I am most confident in, I will then pick some of the best looking and meaningful pieces and then take those forward to become much more refined digital outcomes, and then potentially I can look at creating these outcomes physically in a small scale model in order to see what they look like when lightning and other environmental effects are applied to the work in order to achieve a clearer picture of what would happen to my work once it will be placed within Cardiff.

This exercise is to help to pinpoint what area I want to explore, by creating multiple different ideas within many different mediums, I will hopefully by the end of this ideation process, know exactly what type of structure I would like to create.

Commissioning Art in the Public Realm

Professionalism

Within the public realm, it is vital to remain professional, keeping chains of communication and having issues being discussed being transferred to writing and sent over to the clients so that the artist has a base to ensure clients can continuously honor agreements that have been mentioned within verbal meetings.

Research; Art Washing, David Bachelor,

Explore light-based work for the late-night employees. Something for going through Cardiff late at night, Easy to explore the spaces as I work as a Cocktail Bartender and finish work at 5am every Friday and Saturday. A potential way to gather ideas for this is to do a photography shoot after I finish a shift and capturing the areas along with my walk home that feel as though they need work and could benefit from an improvement.

Look at late night experimentations, how can an art piece represent the nightlife present within Cardiff, but also how it could be used to potentially clean up Cardiff?

Reduce waste after Friday/ Saturday nights? As well as something to brighten and calm the atmosphere of Cardiff City Center in the very small hours in the morning as the morning fog begins to set in and the temperature drops below freezing.

 

Site-specific art was pioneered in the 1950s & 60s, where art was taken further and further away from the museum and started to become more than just the art piece itself, the social and cultural impacts of the time become part of the art pieces as well.

Research Terms

Psychogeography

This is an approach to geography which places emphasis on playfulness around the urban environment. A primary point of Psychogeography is something that jolts people, the artwork that is considered Psychogeography is normally a mobile art that has no fixed audience.

Socially Engaged Art

Active Space

Topography

Correlation between the private person and the public place.

Research into Dada, disrupting social spaces.

Links between site-specific art and the art itself,

Architecture- The construction of the building, the complex and carefully designed structure of something (Linking to the complex human brain).

Look at the architecture of buildings, contemplate if they have the potential to be repurposed and how this could come to be.

The poetics of space (Gaston Bachelard).

Social Space

A social space can be physical or virtual, a place where people gather and interact, all space is social and social space has always been a product.

Social mirror (1983).

Looking at how spaces change, look at Food by Gordon Matta Clark.

Activism Within Sites

A practice of vigorous action or involvement as a means of achieving political or other goals.

How to intervene within a public space in order to raise awareness of an issue.

How can things be misinterpreted?

Territory

Test social space, placing an innocent-looking item in some countries will carry much more sinister undertones, the situation within the country will result in different reactions to these objects/behaviors

Communal Monumental

Having an artist start something and giving community ownership and watching the change (7,000 Trees).

 

Books & Authors to Consider

Decadent

The Reenchantment of Art

Miwon Kwon & Claire Docherty

Concepts moving forward

The parts of this lecture that interested me, in particular, were the examples of the art pieces that provoke community engagement, Presenting something that can be interacted with and therefore the community may then take it further, or then entirely different messages can then occur because of this one small change made by the artist. Social attitudes towards different objects and attitudes can then be measured as the piece progresses throughout the time that the public art piece stands, The 7,000 trees concept seems particularly interesting to me, how the community took ownership of the artist’s project and then even used that as a sort of weapon wielded by the community, stopping companies from parking their cars and halting production at an Opel factory by covering the car park with these trees and as they were political, no politician wanted to risk criticism for ordering the trees to be taken down.

The challenge with creating a piece like this is that if the project only gains significant impact when others are interacting with it, while you as the artist can predict what your work will look like, you cannot predict what random members of the public will perform to the public art piece.

 

 

As I have to visit the space where my planned public art piece will sit, it seems vital for it to be within Cardiff itself, Given that I do not know much at all about both Cardiff’s history and the existing public art within the city, it seems important to look over both of these factors as well as evaluate the different public art present within Cardiff.

To do this I have started looking through the Cardiff Public Art Register. Allowing me to look through the entirety of the public art that is in Cardiff as well as; the artists that crafted them, the date they were made as well as the meaning for their creation and the visual metaphors that they carry with them.

The Cardiff Public Art Register

Some of the more interesting examples that seemed to stand out to me are posted below.

Natural Selection, 2006

I decided to pick this piece out of the large array available within Cardiff’s public art due to my eye being particularly drawn to it, as well as the thought-provoking visual metaphor that I believe is placed within it.

After slightly further research into the Public Art piece, I could not find a concrete written description of the messages and themes behind the construction of the work, however, after a short visual review of the work and a thought on the title of the work I think that the large tree within the sculpture represents a sort of tree of life representing the growth and ever-changing systems present within life and the process of natural selection. I think that the small segments that are cut out from the sculpture could represent the traits and evolutionary steps that get “cut out” from environments through the system of natural selection. This is supported by the large box-like structures that the work is placed upon gradually get thinner and thinner, as throughout time the number of different traits and species has reduced and thinned out over time. The towering structure seeks out attention from viewers walking past, although some negatives about the piece are that it is only simply visual, although visually striking there is no element of interactivity for the viewer or any immediate sense of a multi-sensory experience, while this example does contain interesting and useful visual metaphors, I think that beyond that it does not prove very useful research for my field project specifically, however it has provoked some interesting thoughts as to my own public art piece creation.

Mind’s Eye, 2006

Commissioned by the Psychology department within Cardiff University, this piece uses an interesting method of interactivity, an art piece that requires a viewer to stand at a certain angle with a certain perspective in order to be viewed to its full impact. This is an interesting concept, as while the audience will still be involved and interact with the piece to a certain extent, it is not on such a level of interaction that the actual outcome and formation of the art piece is altered, only the way in which the lone viewer will see the work depending on where they are in correlation to the building. If i were to make a piece like this it would still allow me to have a certain amount of control over the work but still make the audience feel involved with it, It also allows the work to effectively interact with the architecture and environment that surrounds it.

When comparing the two works, I feel a combination of the two could be optimal, however overall I think that the second piece is closer to something that I want to achieve, the interactivity concept is something that continues to interest me more and more as the days go on with this project. However careful planning and execution is required in order to create and engaging and effective art piece that holds a significant message.