Artistic Endeavors II: Intricacy

For my art class this semester, I have been developing a project that started with the premise that human and natural systems are inter-connected. Actually, it really started with me doodling cicada wings and tadpoles and wanting to make nature art. I thought about trying to make illustrations, or rather, visual accompaniments for some of my poems, but nothing really stuck me until I came up this premise. Then I started making more concrete sketches:

The hand underneath these was just me drawing the veins I could see in my own hand. The overlay of the cicada wing was done on tracing paper. There was another one with an overlay of a mitten-shaped sassafras leaf. I really liked the way the lines/veins overlapped with these, but the overlays were hard to read, that is, it was hard to tell what was going on or what it was trying to do. So I tried to loosen up and make some large sketches that allowed both aspects to show more clearly. I was going to make a hand/cicada wing sketch, but somehow my mind got sidetracked once I made the leaf/hand and I decided to make a leaf/heart instead.

Sometime around here, I came up with a sort of artist's statement: I want to show that the lifeblood of humanity and the natural world is fundamentally the same. We spring from the same source - Mother Nature - and should not consider ourselves superior to the natural world. All living things are connected and dependent on one another.

There was a lot of class discussion about where I could go from here. We talked about scanning in my designs or re-creating them on the computer to more effectively combine them and keep the precise detail from the earlier sketches. There was also a push to move into three dimensions and make some kind of sculptural piece that would show the change and overlap between the two. As much as I wanted to make my integrations flat, I really dislike computers for making art because I feel like I can't control it as well, so I resisted that route, leaving me with the three-dimensional aspect. However, sculpture has never been something I have been very good at, so it took a lot of self-motivation for me to force myself to consider what I could even attempt to do in 3-D. This was probably the most challenging aspect for me, to move into a new medium, one with which I next to no experience, and make myself keep going forward with it.

I came up with the idea of making a wire outline that would provide one layer and perhaps another wire piece or a drawing to provide the other. I ended up making a wire heart outline and creating various backdrops for it. I wanted the shadows on the paper to provide the outline with which the drawing would interact, so I took used a green light-bulb so that it would cast red shadows, like the blood of the heart, and give green light to the natural elements. I thought to make some kind of collage with different parts of nature fitting into different parts of the shadows. At first I was tracing over the shadows in red pencil to make them stand out more and so I could draw/make impressions of leaves on the paper and know where the boundaries were, but the class suggested I let the shadows speak for themselves, so I made another without the red lines drawn in and this gave it a more natural integration between the drawn nature pieces and the human heart.

There was much discussion as to what the background drawings should do or look like. Everyone liked the drawn collage better than the one made with impressions, but we weren't sure if it was too forced, if the collage should spread out and fill the whole page, and so on. Because these collages were too disjointed, I returned to the original system integration idea. This idea was helped along a bit my my reading of Thoreau for my American Environmental Writing class and a particular passage in the chapter entitled "Spring":

The whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are sill vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in the axils... Is not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may be regarded, fancifully, as a lichen, Umbilicaria, on the side of the head...

So I created a background that was a whole natural system (a tree) to relate to the human circulatory system:

And then my camera died and I didn't get around to getting batteries for a few weeks... During which I decided to make the heart properly three-dimensional as it looked to fake and drawn in this iteration whereas the tree looked much more 'real'. I was frustrated by trying to make 3-D hearts from flat drawings I found on the internet. So I went to the Biology department. The head of the department lent me a 3-D plastic model of a heart and the anatomy professor allowed me access to a bucket of sheep hearts as models. So eventually I had made a good 3-D heart and at that point the idea for the background of the hearts had developed a lot.

We talked about what I would do with this heart and at first I wanted to make some kind of collage in the heart or cover it with cicada wings, but at some point Kristine brought up the idea of sound because she thought of the sound of a heart or the sound of cicadas when she saw my work. This gave me the idea of making not just one heart, but many and making a progression of them with a pulse-line to keep the beat. I debated about how, or if, the hearts should develop. I decided on keeping the hearts themselves free of collage elements and having there be a background drawing of some natural systems to accompany the hearts. I also decided that having these drawing depict some kind of growth would fit best with what I was trying to convey. If they were static or simply variations on a theme, there would not be the same sense of connection between all the elements. As the heart beats over time and the human continues to live and grow, so, too, does the natural world grow and develop at its own rate.

We moved on to Annie Dillard in Environmental Writing and from her came the eventual decision to call this piece 'Intricacy'. Basically, this was the idea for the background, though these drawings (and the rectangle outline) were not done until much later:

At first I couldn't decided between the cicada and the tree developments, but the addition of the pulse-line running from one end to the other, allowed me room above and below it to work. The number of developments was determined partially by how many steps it would take to show a clear development, but most actually by the size of the paper I cut and how many beats I could make on the pulse-line from the length of wire I cut. Working with the wire, especially the thick wire for the pulse-line was very frustrating. As for the hearts themselves, it took me a long time to get the first model heart completed. Three attempts were abandoned (by which I mean violently destroyed) in frustration before I had one I felt was satisfactory. That heart was the model for the rest and though it was still frustrating, by the end I had a routine down that made the production of more hearts, if not easy, at least not intimidating anymore. Eventually I had all the hearts made and most of the drawings complete:

But it didn't feel like it had a proper start or finish. I tried several end images - here a sketch for one is in place – a knothole from a real tree with a sprout planted in it – but none worked for me. I was hoping to give it end-pieces that showed how the dead tree would re-start the cycle and the cicada propagates itself, but nothing was working out. I also really wanted to incorporate some organic element, but the work resisted. A lot of people wanted some dirt incorporated somehow and I really wanted to add some cicada shells, but it just didn't seem to fit the intricacy and delicateness of the wire and pencil. In the end, I got the feeling of a 'start' and 'end' by making this section simply a snapshot of a larger process - the ends of the pulse go beyond the boundaries of this growth cycle. The white paper, once cut disappeared into the wall, so I added a thin green border. It was my intention to put it all the way around, but I hadn't quite finished by class time and everyone liked the way the top left corner being bordered balanced the weight of the drawings on the far right, so here it is:

These pictures make it hard to see, I think, because the green light confuses the camera. But when you look at the real thing, the shadows are red and you can see the hearts better and the drawings better because they are on separate (but related) planes.

For the last couple of weeks, I made a summary sketch and mini-project (which is still awaiting photographing) which I hope kind of sum up and expand upon the ideas presented in "Intricacy." Basically, I am working with two elements – nature and human. There is an undeniable relation between these two and in "Intricacy" I am trying to show that we are the same, that our ways overlap with the ways of plants and animals, even the insects which so often disgust us. The summary project also speaks to our relationship, but more as the idea that we come from nature and must in turn support it, since our existence affect its existence so much.