cubes and rooms

Hi pierpaolo!

The cube project allowed me to explore materials, I love being in the workshops constructing things so I made many cubes all the same size but from different materials attempting always to make a 'perfect' cube.  After looking at everyone else's work I realised that the scientific part of my brain had allowed me to be stopped by the precise definition of what a 'cube' is, and I was actually really excited and inspired by people's work that explored what a cube was without actually being an exact cube.

I liked the idea of a site specific installation, and always when thinking about my response I want to explore the world where science and art overlap.  I constructed a rhomboid from wood, I really loved the final shape and in particular how at certain angles it looks like an isometric drawing of a cube. 

I called it a 'thinking microscope' and it was meant to focus your vision on a certain part of the building and then there was a text describing this specific field of vision on atomic and subatomic levels - I studied Physics on these levels and found it irreconcilable with reality to comprehend that so many unimaginable intricate interactions were happening all the time on the microscopic scale - so was hoping to deal with this in some way.  However the text wasn't very effective in the end, but I liked the final piece as I liked the challenge of building a box all with angles and paying attention to all the final details.

Hope you have had a nice holiday and looking forward to meeting you soon

Abby

Dear Pierpaulo,

Hi my name is Rob Pretorius and my final outcome for the 'room' project, a paper mache door, was made in response to the idea of 'building sets' for films. For me, a film set stands for fiction and 'the make believe' and there is something about the connection between propaganda in news items, film and other forms of media which was really interesting.

The newspaper I used to make this door relates to the specific history of the site of this sculpture. At the end of the project it seemed that I could improve what I had done so far by simplifying my ideas so I am keen to take some of the themes from this project into the new year.

At present I have flu. Fun. Hopefully I'll be back asap.

Cheers

Rob

Happy New Year Pier Paolo ! from Beverley Calvert

 The cube project was a fascinating one for me - in fact I did become a little obsessed with seeing cubes everywhere I looked!The very mathematical nature of its  shape began to haunt  me and my aim became distortion and frowning upon its very perfection. I began looking at the project by examining my own personal cube - my obsessions... be it chocolate; sugar, salt, shoes! and from there looked at the breaking down of cubes,, in the end I was making large fragile tent like cubes and thrown together pieces of wood ...all open ended and imperfect yet retaining the idea of the perfect cube

For the project "Room" I decided to focus on the stairs we walk up and down every day and how it would feel to change the dynamics of our very oddly shaped studio - as did Daniel Buren- to prevent people walking the way they should and make them have these obstructions in their way that should be practical and help you climb somewhere but that are in fact useless. I had to make multiple units to create the desired effect and learnt lots of practical skills in the workshop along the way. Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow

Dear Pierpaolo

Hello, Happy New Year!
 I enjoyed the scope for experimentation that 'cube' allowed.  I worked with lots of different materials which helped introduce me to sculpture.

Moving on I started afresh with 'Room'.  I found inspiration from a passage in Italo Calvino's 'Invisible Cities' about the Roman Gods: Penates and Lares.  Briefly, the passage questioned the idea of the essense of buildings;  whether the living inhabitants or the innate structure is paramount.  Therefore i tried to embody this idea in my work.
My site helped me greatly for the development of my idea.  The hole in the wall immediately caught my attention as appropraite, the battle between exterior and interior.

Best Wishes
Laura Harwood

hello pierpaolo.

i am jonas gustafsson and below are some images of what i made during the "room" project.

i was working on two different projects simultaneously (one being an extension of an "open cube" i did during the first week in the sculpture pathway, the other being what's shown above). i decided to put the former idea on hold, might revisit it later on.

anyway, to get to the point, i made a replica of a pipe using hollow cardboard tubes, clay and mod roc, and put it up vertically in the studio. i made a little hatch so that i could hide an mp3 player and portable speakers inside the pipe. the sounds playing were recordings from the river fleet that i digitally enhanced and then made into a loop using audio editing software.
i was fascinated with the fact that the river flows underneath back hill and can actually be seen and heard from the sub-basement of college. i was also inspired by poems by ben johnson and jonathan swift describing the river and its history, as well as some of rachel whiteread's work but using sound instead of matter - or rather, the *focus* being on the sound rather than the physical object. the relation between sound, space and physicality is something i aim to explore further during the course.

i hope you (and everyone else in the group) have had a nice christmas and a good start to the new year. looking forward to seeing you all again.

best, jonas

Hey Pierpaulo, hope you had a good xmas. I've tried to upload the video, then the photo and its not working. Ill show you it when i return. My piece is essentially a map of the room. I was firstly inspired by the overhead pipes. Something i did as a child sprung to mind. I used to walk around my house holding a mirror in front of me facing up. This gave the illusion i was walking on the ceiling. I repeated my childhood game in the sculpture studio. I strapped a camera to my face and filmed the reflection. I restricted  my movement to the perimeter of the tables, which mapped them. I was also mapping the ceiling in the reflection and the floor because the camera was facing it and picking up the movement from me walking on it. I wanted to include the walls to give my "map" more information. I used the window frames as a grid for the different shots. Each shot is dictated by a different table/obstacle and arranged according to its position in the room.                                                                                                                The POV effect is slightly nauseating.  The simultaneous movement of all 12 shots and the fact it's upside down is disorientating. I would've liked it if all the shots were always playing. I could loop the shorter shots. This would make it simpler and stronger. The disorientation would be constant. As a piece it would be more pure, although as a map it would loose clarity. In hindsight i would've looped the shorter shots.        Sid Charity

Hello Pierpaolo!

Dear Pierpaolo,

One of the first things we were told during the cube project was to bring in a ‘bag of material’. At first I was extremely excited, I had imagined bringing a bag full of bricks, cans, branches, metal… but I couldn’t find anything like this near where I lived, so I decided to explore the materials that we have used in ‘art class’ since we were children: different types of paper, cello tape, etc. This led to the creation of different types of cube. I have always been very interested in quantity and how that affects a piece, so when I found ‘my’ cube, I decided to recreate it hundreds of times to be able to pile them together (underneath).

During the room project I continued with the idea of ‘art class’ materials and decided to use newspaper, also in part because I was interested in the history of the building. I wanted people to engage with the work, get really close to it, read it, touch it, for it to envelop them. But, unfortunately, it didn’t really work out. Maybe it is because there should have been more newspaper, or because the print was too small; or maybe because it was too bright, or it didn’t cover enough of the area (there was a health and safety issue, and I couldn't cover the door as I had intended). I think all these things culminated, and in the end I couldn’t decide if I was happy with the finished piece or not.

See you soon,

Ana Gold