Wet Lab:
Because of my absences, I spent very little time in the wet lab, however, even in the sessions that I had, I found so much enjoyment in the tactile nature of it. The way it engaged all the senses so dramatically pushed me down a touch-based, sensory path and away from the digital ideas, I began with.
This realisation made the materials an incredibly important part of what I was doing. Naturally, my sculpture would create a visual response of some type, however, I was desperate to create a dialogue between several senses.
So I decided that touch and sound would also play ambiguous roles in the piece. I wanted to use materials that created a variety of auditory tones; one dull and understated, another jarring and loud, some to chime and tinkle, one that crashes and reverberates, etc. Finding these materials and trying to source a variety of mediums ranging from glass to ceramic to wood and metal was engaging as it forced me to adapt to the different ways these behaved from an auditory and touch-based perspective. For example; smashing op shop plates and cheap mirrors created a wrenching, deafening, crack, but when they were later suspended on wool the colliding pieces merely bounced off one another, dancing and chiming merely; not the character I’d expected them to play in the final sculpture.
I decided early on in my making that I wanted my work to hang as this would likely create an unpredictable but hopefully attractive rippling movement, and allow more readily for the work to create sound. So it was a matter of finding materials that possessed both of these properties/abilities and then slowly problem-solving until I was able to manipulate them into my vision, a mental image which needed to remain fluid; I was trying not to cling too tightly to my control over the mediums.
