ToL 2.25
Client Brief:
“ A Tree-of- Life with 2 ravens lifting off from it “
OK…I’ll give that a think for a minute…
The Tree-of-Life – metaphorically, a diagram of connection, by birth and by choice.
From ancestral roots to familial branches etc.
Historically, analogue connections – built through direct interaction.
Enter: the digital era.
Suddenly, Interconnections can reach much farther.
(Arguably) enriching the scope of connected humanity, the data age has also allowed storytelling to be curated and disseminated to greater degrees than ever in history.
Connections, once entirely ‘rooted’ in an analogue form, have ‘branched’ virtually through an evolving digital ecosystem. And that ecosystem reaches back…
It is with all this in mind that the design for ToL2.25 developed.
Questions? yes…
My brain food is probably sci-fi pulp baked with a dash of social commentary sprinkled deliciously throughout a near-future taken to some Nth degree, lightly glazed in ‘ a little bit of history repeating ‘.
Long before data became the clay for social modelling, one vision that embraced the nascent tech-reality at the time in a future shaped absolutely by algorithm was tech-noir film gem, “The Matrix©”.
Riffing on that 1999 conceit of an existence we can either accept with relative ease, or question with increasing difficulty, ToL 2.25 renders this representation of human physical lineage, The Tree -of-Life, as a digitized construct written entirely in binary code (running vertically ala The Matrix©)
In this hyper-personalized case, the 1s and 0s are replaced by lower case “l”s & “r”s.
(The ravens though ‘are real’… ;-p )
I could bang on about correlations to our reality 25yrs later but let’s save that chat for the ‘real world’.
-C
INSTALLED:
I think ToL 2.25 is an aesthetically strong, yet ambiguous statement that shimmers in situ.
The light play behind the glass is naturally indirect and shifting so the work renders differently, continuously. The repeating pattern of faceted carved text reads in a dappled undulating flicker as the viewer moves, or as the back light changes. The image as a whole exists in quiet stoic silhouette while made up internally of a life-force in constant flux.
Me ‘Glass-plainin’ ToL2.25:
(or: why is it done like this, BTW ?) – side notes..
Not to brag, but ‘Ive generated a fairly giant list of ways to bugger up a perfectly innocent piece of glass by just putting a ton of effort into it.
By far the heaviest donor to that ignoble tally is catastrophic stress failure.
This occurs near the end of the process but is created by way of pattern carving – blissfully by yours truly – at the beginning of the process.
This doesn’t apply to all designs, obviously, but enough random ones that I now create my rules and boundaries based as much on fear as fact. Well, sort of.
When tempering for example, if you want to put a hole near a corner, in glass that is to be tempered, you can NOT position the hole equi-distance from both edges. It must be offset.
Although I’m not carving holes right through the material, similar issues have arisen around proximity to edges in relation to geometric shapes (mostly sharp angles) and depth of those shapes.
Anyway, I’ve also managed to have pieces fail well into production but long before they even get near a tempering oven, so yeah baby! Mad skills.
In all this time I still don’t have any hard and fast rules but I’ve definitely learned to consider what could happen down the process road when designing.
I start with questions like: “Is that sharp pointy shape dangerously close to an edge?” or “ Hey, look at that long arc running from one side to another- doesn’t it look like a score line?”.
How’d I learn that, you ask?
(sigh)..
So, back to our recognizable Tree-of- Life image.
First Q: “ Hey, doesn’t that design sort of resemble a breakage pattern…?”
Oh man…!
Challenge accepted. 😉
Physically this layout broke the dangerous ‘fracture pattern’ design up and increased the chance of success, too. That was a plus.
MATERIAL :
- (49″ x 84″) 10mm tempered with SINATRA BLUE FRIT
- kiln-fire: de-temper panel
- hand-carve artwork
- kiln-fire: re-vitrify carving & re-anneal panel
- re-temper panel
Cheers for reading -C
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