Metamorphosis

Metamorphosis

Incorporating Plants

24/12/15

I made the  decision to begin incorporating plants into my project, since it was something I was interested in, and it was also something that has become a running theme throughout my work in all units. Not only that, but plants showed an element of metamorphosis, I feel, through the stages of decay, since plants are something that are constantly changing. 

Using the plaster block I had created the week previous, I decided to try and fix ivy into it somehow, but before doing that, I covered it in sand by first painting it was a PVA glue and water mixture. Overall the sand didn't stick too well, but it worked well enough for what I had planned.

After sticking the sand into the block, I began thinking about how I could add the ivy into it in a way that had interesting shapes to look at, and looked different from every angle. 

Since the plaster was relatively soft. I was able to push lengths of wire into it that were curved because they had come off a coil. This seemed like a good idea as it had the interesting shapes I wanted and looked different from every angle.

When it came to putting the ivy on, I soon became aware that the wire was too thin and lightweight to support the weight of the plant, and so I moved on to looking at how I could still achieve the same affect, but rather than using a lot of wire or a thicker wire for support, how j could use the plant on its own, in a way that it could still support itself.

I found some unique shaped branches of ivy, ones that had twisted in strange ways rather than having plain and straight clippings, and began looking at a way I could apply them to the block without using huge amounts of wire.

I then thought about pinning it in using the wire I had experimented with, so that, rather than having the plants in their own, I had something to secure them to the plaster as well as something that would enable me to place the clippings as I wished without a huge length of wire to guide them. 

To create the pins, I simply pushed some wire that was about 4 centimetres long into one end of the ivy clipping and folded it over so that it was secure around the branch, and dos it to the other end, then pushed it into the plaster block where I wanted it. 

This method gave me a lot more control over the plant unlike the previous method, and it also made it look a lot more natural, as there was little wire to be seen.

Once I had as much ivy on the block as I wanted, I then began using previous experimentation with apply paint techniques as well as my chosen colours for the colour association. I dropped the colours into the block, which was sat in a piece of A2 paper, so that the ivy clippings were sufficiently covered, and the technique used was also shown on the paper, which would also become part of the piece.