Trang Pham

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Last 4 week Project 2017

Tittle: Watch out

My sister, who is 4 years younger than me, once told me about how her friend recently starts to see and date people she talks to online, which, in my opinion, is very dangerous. I started to question how much do you need to know of a person before you give in full trust? So I transferred this idea into a 3D work for my last 4 week project. To me, this is more like a learning experience because there were making processes I have never gone through before; For example, working with plaster gauze, building molds from alginate and casting hands using plaster, and so on. The biggest struggle i had was that my two plaster arms kept breaking. I made three. One of them broke so bad there wasn’t anything I could do to fix it. The other two I had to wait for them to dry completely before being able to glue all the fingers back together. Another thing I wasn’t satisfied is that I tried to make what’s going on behind the “computer screen” to contrast with the pictures I had on the mask. But since I spent too much time on fixing my plaster hands and everything else, I ended up presenting that contrast poorly with the decoration of a couple of liquor bottles. 

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Project: In a New Light - Object: leaves

A wire tree and dichroic filmed glass leaves

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Project: In a New Light - Object: leaves

A leaf made out of twine

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Project: In a New Light- Object: Leaves

Leafy freckles and lips 

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Project: In a New Light- Object: Leaves

My attempt on fashion illustration using leaves 

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Project: In a New Light - Object: A leaf

A watercolor print using leaves

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Project: In a New Light- Portraying an analog object in a new way 

My Object: Leaf :) 

A ring made out of leaves !

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Week 4 Rotation- Conceptual Toolkit (2)

This is another piece sharing the similar concept of attachment as one of human’s fears. This time I used candies (those sticky ones), specifically starbursts and tootsies, to present the idea of attachment. We tend to get attached to things that are lovely and sweet. To me, they are my family back in Vietnam, or my childhood memories. But in this concept, I want to illustrate how  these attachments, if getting too strong, could sometimes get in the way of one’s self-exploration and further development as an independent being

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Week 4 Rotation- Conceptual Toolkit

The concept I did was about attachment as a fear. It is the fear of getting too attached to something that one could no longer live or function without the other. These two pieces of wood were fine at the beginning. However, once they got significantly attached to the other like the model I did, if they ever got detached, they will both be left broken and functionless. This piece was inspired by the concept of my tape “drawing” from the last rotation, where I also portrayed my homesickness, a type of attachment, as an undesirable feelings.

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Week 3 Rotation- Drawing off Paper (2)

Another assignment from the class was to drawing by salt. Above is the picture of a quick collaborative piece we did in our first time experimenting this technique. Unfortunately, due to the limit of time, we could not do an individual piece the next day. However, I will definitely do more study about this salt drawing technique and perhaps come back to this material in one of my future project.

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A one-minute video project for my Video-Rotation class.

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Week 6 Rotation- Painting In the past, I had a serie of paintings of a human figure with a large natural object on her head to show the connection of human and nature and how nature helps convey the story or the mood of the human figure. Thus, this time I decided to do another painting to add to the serie. Regarding the technical process, I found myself struggling in painting the roses and mimicking the petal’s texture and colors. The colors did not blend well, thus making the image look rough, failing to convey the smoothness of the objects in the picture. I am also not satisfied with the image as the whole as it looks quite plain to me. Signing up for the painting class again, I wished we had learned a different way to approach a painting and worked with different medium.

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Week 5 Rotation- Figure Drawing So far this was the class I got most works out and really see my self learning and improving each day. The teacher always encouraged me to step out of my comfort zone, from drawing small human figures to going for a much larger scale. Having the chance to work with a variety of models of different statures, I now feel much more confident in getting down on paper the shape and the weight of the figures quickly and more accurately.

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Week 4 Rotation- Nature Drawing I was very excited to take this drawing class since I have never done any drawing of nature before. In this class, I had a chance to do some close studies and observation of objects in nature, which was very crucial in changing my way of approaching my drawing. Specifically, besides the shapes of the objects, I really had learned how to use different mediums to depict the textures. The main class assignment was to pick 3 natural objects and make a drawing of them. The challenge of this assignment was to focus on the space, compositions, and the roles of the objects in the drawing as a whole. I had a tendency to work closely in one part and try to get all the details before I move to another, which essentially wasn’t the best way to approach this assignment. Although towards the last class, I did force myself to work on the image as a whole and attempt to fill up the space, I did not have enough time to finish my piece. Nevertheless, the assignment has prompted me to think of still life in a different way and to take more risk in combining different mediums in my piece to create unpredictable results.

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Week 3 Rotation- 3D In this class, I was asked to first make an object out of clay that serves as the connection between my hand and my body. The place where I wanted the clay to come in contact was where my heart is; I wanted to depict part of my personality, that I’m a compassionate and sentimental person, and also the fact that I’ve always been proud of: I come from a loving family. The process of shaping the wood block gave me significant experience in working with wood and utilizing different tools, both hand tools and air tools. Although my piece was not complete yet due to the limited time, I considered it as one of my successful works because of how I really enjoyed the process of making it.