During my first module, Visual Communications, I have been assigned for the second task to work individually to create a proposal for a piece of public art relating to its context.
The Brief
To create a proposal for a piece of public art relating to its context. This will necessitate by doing site research, taking site photographs conceiving of designing and produce a reduced scale Maquette of a piece of the public are relating to its context. Think of how to create a physical structure. Try to be as inventive and create as possible, whilst ensuring that the outcome communications it’s meaning clearly. Any material, techniques and processes can be used if considered to be piratical and relevant but within the assignment, it must include the application of digital imagery. You will present the proposal aspect of the blog for a group critique. Your blog will be the source of assessment and all aspects of the design process from brief to evolution/critical response must be recorded. The deadline for this project is 3.00pm on Thursday the 26th on November 2017.
Research of Public Art
“Usually, but not always, public art is commissioned specifically for the site in which it is situated. Monuments, memorials, and civic statues and sculptures are the most established forms of public art, but public art can also be transitory, in the form of performances, dance, theatre, poetry, graffiti, posters and installations.” – Tate. org.uk
I have looked at a range of public art such as sculpture and serpentine pavilions as well as artists to get a better idea of the full extent of what I can make for this project.
I also looked at a range of different artists, some featured above, to get an idea of the different styles, objects and surrounds that inspired them for context. From the photographs above its clear that size, scale and placement play a large part in how successful the designer is at visually communicating their context as well as how visually impacting they are overall. All the public art above makes the most of the space available making them have a large impact on mainly open public spaces, the scale of them also so adds to the significance as they are all either dramatically scaled up creating a single but overwhelming sized piece for example like the ” I See What You Mean” piece by Lawrence Argent or scaled down dramatically but with a larger number of pieces to create an installation with an overwhelming quantity such as the “Field for the British Isles” by Antony Gormley.
Most of the pieces of public art above also have been constructed from a mixer of materials such as glass, metal, wood, stone and clay which are all partially durable and lasting materials. The materials also play a large part in making the piece more impacting by the surrounding they are placed in, for example, wooden sculptures and pavilions contrast with the concert surround of the cities they are placed in. The bold colours of some of the pieces also add impact as it makes them stand out more in their environments, such as the way the blue bear of the ” I See What You Mean” piece by Lawrence Argent stands out the most because of how the colour contrast with the grey of the city as well as reflection of the glass building it’s against.
Research for Places of Context
When thinking of a general area to look at for inspiration I decide to look at Sheffield and the Peak District as it is the area I live in and has places and stories that I am familiar with. I, First of all, made a mind map of certain areas, facts and folktales that I have researched and that I was most interested in. After this research, I decided I wanted to defiantly focus on stories and places from inside the Peak District. I then made a more focused mind map including the places/stories I might use for context as well as ideas of public art installations I could make to fit the place of context.
After considering with Paul and Mark I am going to develop the idea of a dining furniture suspended from the ceiling of the Dining Room in the Blue John Cavern, Hope Valley.
The context behind this idea comes from the story that Lord Mulgrave, full name Constantine John Phipps, 2nd Baron Mulgrave (19 May 1744 – 10 October 1792), who owned Blue John Caverns once entertained a group of miners to a dinner of some sort in one of the large open spaces down in the cavern. He possibly also dinned with aristocrats in the space too depending on what story you believe. The room in which they dinned in has been known since as Lord Mulgrave’s Dining Room. The Dining Room Formed when two underground rivers met forming a whirlpool which then created its circular shape. Holes for the eighteen candles used to light the chamber can still be seen in its walls.
Development
My first idea was to make a plastic model of a table and chair and then superimpose it on an image of the cavern space. I decided that I wanted to make my public art piece out of clear plastic or glass so you could either see through the piece or it would reflect the surrounding and so would not obstruct the details or appear to reduce the size of the cavern. After considering what materials to use to make the model I decided that making a model as going to be the default and look poor quality as I didn’t have any glass, perspex or plastic sheeting and trying to make such an angular and symmetrical sculpture would be very difficult when making it at such a small size.
After discussing my project with Matt he helped me come up with the idea of taking a pre illustrated image of a table and chairs off of the internet and then cutting it out on Photoshop and altering the picture to make it appear as a 3D rendered clear model which could be superimposed on to a picture of Lord Mulgrave’s Dining Room.
We developed this more by discussing how I could take my own picture down in the cavern so I had the correct angle of the room that I needed and then printing my pictures out on to form board. Once I had done this I could then still make a 3D rendered image on Photoshop of my sculpture and print it out on to acetate sheets. The acetate sheets with the sculpture printed on them as different angles could then be placed over the top of my cavern photography’s to show a before and after of how the room would as well as making it easier to still see the cavern in the background.
I arranged with a relative who works at Blue John Cavern it would be possible to be taken down inside the cavern and able to take the photographs I need for this projects. He agreed to take me down and we discussed possible days and times, the best time he could take me is on Saturday the 21st of November which would be just 6 days before the deadline. I also Matt advised me it would be best to take my photos first in order to get the best angles that match when making the model on photoshop, the downside means that my project is on hold slightly until Saturday and I will have to put in a lot of hours to the project on proposal done of the 3.00pm deadline on Thursday the 26th. The majority of the work will have to be completed on the 23rd and 24th when I’m at college so I can get help when using Photoshop and printing.
Photography
Photography is going to play a large part in how well I can make my proposal looks when it comes to my project. As part of my development and researcher I have been reading up on the best ways to get good pictures in caverns, from my research I learned that to achieve the best results I will need to take as little equipment as possible as the passageways can be narrow and it will be hard to move around caverns with large amount of equipment. It was also advised my all of the websites and blogs I read that using a tripod and a remote shutter to reduce movement will help to create more clear photos. All the information I read all stated that every photographer had used a wide angle Lens in order to get as much of the view in the photo as possible.
I already have most of the equipment I need such as a camera, tripod and remote shutter and lucky was able to borrow a 12-24mm wide-angle Nikon camera lens from the photography department in the college. This will be essential to showing the majority of the cavern and portraying the scale of the room to the sculpture and people.
On Saturday the 21st I got the train to Hope Valley where Ryan a relative who works in Blue John Cavern and my younger cousin Liam (who became my assistant while I took photos in the carven) picked me up and took me to the cavern. Ryan took myself and Liam down on our own without any other tour groups and made sure we were safe while inside and gave me notice when I would have to pause shooting while tour groups were lead into the different parts of the caverns we were in. we spent approximately an hour and a half down in the carven before climbing all 240-ish stairs back to the entrance.
The biggest problem I faced while taking photos was that even though I had a wide angle lens the caverns were so wide I still struggle to get all the width and height in the photo’s and would have got even better results by using a larger wide angle lens. The wall lights used to light the had their own strengths and weakness. There was a mixture of yellow colour bulb lights as well as white LED lights that created different warmer red and cooler white colours and shadows in the cavern room, this gave a slight look of fire in the carven as if we had reached the centre of the earth. The weakness they brought to the picture though is that the camera picked up many light orbs from the wall lights as well as some of the strong LED lights whiting out parts of the carven wall which they were closest too.
While in the cavern I also manage to get one of the tour groups passing through to stand together and look up towards the roof of the cavern as if looking amazed at my public art sculpture.
Photo of Lord Mulgrave’s Dining Room taken from in a small opening inside the cavern
My 11-year old cousin Liam standing to hight perspective inside the Dining Room
A tour group in the cavern showing scale perspective and an insight into how the public art sculpture will look with people underneath.
A wide-angle shot of Lord Mulgrave’s Dining Room
Sculpture Development
Once I had taken my photographs inside the Blue John Caverns I worked on how to create my model in Photoshop. I used a website called Envato Elements to get 3D rendered images of dining tables and chairs as the website allowed me to rotate the images to the right angle I needed to match the perspectives in the cave and then screenshot them to save the images to my desktop.
I cut around the images to remove the white background and then placed them into my photos of Lord Mulgrave’s Dining room to see how well they looked. Paige then helped me to use the filter tool on Photoshop to try and create the affected the table was opaque.
When we had Matt teaching us on Monday afternoon he helped me to develop my model as I had limited knowledge of how to use Photoshop. We tried to change the colour of the dining set to white and lower the opacity to make the table look more realistically like plastic but it, unfortunately, blended all the shapes into one white and I lost the appearance of there being several chairs around a table.
To correct this issue we decided that I would have to find individual chairs and a table and cut them out separately and then place them into the photograph of the cavern room one by one in different layers to appear as a set whilst still being able to edit them individually.
Once I had made and put all the different layers together in Photoshop I was able to make the furniture white so it appeared more like plastic instead of wood as they appear in the originals. I was then able to change the opacity of the chair and the table as well as add highlights and shadows on each separate layer to match the highlight and shadows of the cavern creating the final results.
Proposal
Contextual Analysis
For my research I focused on our surrounding area of Sheffield and the Peak District trying to look specifically at places I have lived by or visited, mainly taking ideas from stories I had heard as a child. I focused furthermore on myths and legends of the Peak District which are often only remembered because of the places named after where the stories happened, such as Lovers Leap, Derwent and Dore. There are no visual public artworks to tell the stories of these places or allow people to visually see and comprehend parts of what happened in these tales. I decided I wanted to create something to visually represents the story of Lord Mulgrave’s Dining Room down inside the Blue John Caverns as well as create a tourist attraction inside which will attract local people to go back into the caverns as well as worldwide tourists.
Conceptual Solution
The concept I decided to develop is a sculpture of a dining table and chairs suspended from the roof of Lord Mulgrave’s Dining room. i want to make a sculpture that is realistic in size and shape to that of normal dining furniture to help people get a sense of how it would look to have been at a dinner party inside of the cavern but be having it suspended from the ceiling people will still be able to walk underneath it and it wouldn’t disrupt tours and tour groups. The sculpture would also be made from a transparent or opaque so it would not obstruct peoples view of the room overall.
precedent
Proposed Solution
Polycarbonate injection-moulded into the desired shape of a Georgian style dining table and chairs, suspended from the cavern ceiling with thin steel cables.
Technical specification
The material used to create the sculpture would be made of injection-moulded polycarbonate. Thin stainless steel cables would be bolted into to each piece of furniture and then bolted into the roof of the carven to secure and suspend the sculpture from the roof of the carven.
Budget
Polycarbonate: £670.02
Steel Cable: £43.60
Injection-Moulding: £10,000
Scaffolding/Fitters: 1 Day, 3 people – £100 per person – scaffolding £950
Total: £19,736.20
Natalie Rose 