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: digital communication, in particular.
Suddenly, Interconnections become less reliant on the ‘real’ to the point where we may never share a physical space with some of our most fundamental relationships and yet still connect to them deeply.
(Arguably) enriching the scope of connected humanity, the data age has also allowed information and storytelling to be curated and disseminated to greater degrees than ever in history, shaping our narratives and sense of self, in new ways.
I’m old enough to remember when there was a clear separation between external influence and ‘actual’ personal connections.
But these actual connections, once entirely ‘rooted’ in an analogue reality, have now ‘branched’ virtually into an evolving digital ecosystem.
It is with all this in mind that the design for ToL2.25 developed.
Questions? yes…
My fave brain food is prophetic art-media, sprinkled with social commentary, baked in sci-fi pulp, spread deliciously throughout a near-future taken to some Nth degree, topped with a light glaze of history repeating.
Long before data became the clay for social modelling, one vision that embraced the new tech-reality and extrapolated a future for humanity shaped absolutely by algorithm was tech-noir gem “The Matrix©”.
Riffing on that ultimate 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’.
I think ToL 2.25 is a visually strong design, yet an 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 light changes. The image as a whole exists in quiet stoic silhouette while made up internally of a life-force in constant flux.
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
ToL2.25
Me ‘Glass-plainin’ :
(or: why is it done like this?)
Brief: “Tree-of- Life with 2 ravens lifting off from it “
My first thought was “yes, nice, I can work with that” – but then I gave it a moment…
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 the catastrophic stress failure.
This occurs near the end of the process but is created by way of pattern carving – blissfully added 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 just like a pre-snap 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. 😉
Now, on a socially conscious level, basically after all the guilt generated by the resource intensive pile of debris I’ve accumulated, in a perfect project, I also try to inject some meaning into the work, if I can.
Physically the layout breaks the dangerous ‘fracture pattern’ design up and increases the chance of success, too. That’s a plus.
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