Evolution

Unit X Art and Science collaboration at Manchester Metropolitan University

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19/05/16 

The night of the exhibition! 

I arrived at Manchester Art Gallery at 1pm and helped unload our sculpture and all the other equipment into the loading bay. I had to carry the wire frame round to the garden space and wheel the bottom part around the gallery facing challenges like fitting into the wheelchair entrance and carrying it over steps. Then once it had been placed in our spot we begun putting up the gazebo around it, something fairly challenging when its very windy. Then we assembled the piece, we cut holes into the tarp and filled them with soil and added all the plants into it. We then decorated it with with our golden potatoes, cotton grass and added the more soil and the silver skull into the middle so it was just about visible if you looked closely. Using green card we cut them into small squares and begun asking the public to add a word or phrase about what their impressions of he piece were. We got a fantastic response and many discussed with us about using food for decoration, the contrast between man-made and natural materials, and how it looked robotic/futuristic. I told many people about how it evolved as a project and how we wanted to create a giant green man sculpture but ended up with something more abstract but still filled with life. On the green papers we got  these responses: “Joyful May Crown” “fairy land” “skull island” “growth through resistance” “A fireless fire pit of glory” drawings, poems and much, much more. I loved the rest of the event to, there was a projector which created a universe room which was fun to play in and watch, and a creative station and medication activity where we learnt to be like children and make art for fun with no end purpose. All in all it was a huge success and I’m glad I got involved and put the work in as it was so rewarding.               

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18/05/16

We finished off the piece as much as we could, using up all the moss, flowers and plants and making the critical decision to transport the two pieces separately. All the plants except from the cut flowers were still alive, and they still looked fine. Then, we travelled to the gallery to see where we’d set up the piece the following day and talk to the gallery curator about what we were all bringing. We decided we’d set up by James Capper’s “Tread Toe” as it would give a interesting contrast between man-made engineering and the natural engineering in our piece. Only issue was the rain which was predicted for the next day, but luckily one of our tutors offered to give us their gazebo.    

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17/05/16

On the second day we really transformed the piece, by threading flowers and vines into the wire frame. We went a bit crazy with the spray paint, using it on the tarp, mesh, wire and even on the potatoes! It gave our piece a futuristic/robotic look and tailored to the man-made vs. nature theme we discussed a week before. We begun to add more modrock and build it around the base of the sculpture. We sprayed the plants with plenty of water but were worried that in the heat of the greenhouse they may not last long.    

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16/05/16

Using Modrock we begun adding it to the wire and sticking the moss to it in the hopes to cover half of it and around the bottom part of the base. We poured soil into the wooden crate, then with the silver tarp we added a tree and a few tall flowers to the base, with the intention of merging the two pieces.  

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11/05/16

Taking the wire out of the greenhouse, we decided to spray paint it gold and silver to give a nice shine. We also sprayed some green mesh silver and gold, with the hope to fill it with soil and plants back in the greenhouse. 

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04/05/16

A scientist came in with a load of fun experiments including growing a tree using copper sulfate solution in an electrodeposition cell, and using a spring attached to an amp to create epic space battle sounds. Although I missed most of the session including him explaining how things worked, I was still able to enjoy playing around with the experiments he brought. 

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27/04/16

In our Wednesday meeting I pitched our idea of straying away from ‘The Green Man’ idea and incorporating our plaster hands into of wire/plant sculpture. Earlier on it was brought up that the piece may contain bugs and MAG staff told us the piece had to be bug-free if it was in the gallery, so Sam said it would look great if it was outside the main entrance in the garden. The next step was to move the piece into a greenhouse at MMU, so we could begin to start building it. We found a crate and some tarpaulin down there and decided to use it as a main base for our work. Using the glue gun and lots of stables we stuck the tarp to the wooden crate, with the intention of filling it with soil to fill with plant life. Then the plants would come through the base and into the wire frame, so they would stay alive. 

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26/04/16

We got making! Using the vines and wire supplied by Anna we rolled the piece into a cylinder and threaded the vines though the holes. this was just a starting point to visualise what the piece might look like, particularly as we had decided to ditch the “man” element and just have lots of painted hands coming out of the piece. 

We tried using modrock to cast our hands, layering the plaster around of fingers over and over until we were happy with coverage. After drying it, we realised taking off the hands was very difficult and despite carefully cutting them off, mine ended up unravelling and the other hand didn’t really look that hand-like. We decided that if the hands were going to be included we’d have to use a mannequin hand or buy an artist drawing hand. 

What was clear was that we needed to develop the piece a lot over the next coming weeks before the exhibition. 

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26/04/16

When we tried to add all the ideas in, wire mesh, plants, hands, large trees and many other elements it started to get a little complicated. We also had the idea to have some of the sculpture chemically eroded and maybe some natural erosion at the bottom, which was something to consider later. We discussed sourcing materials like more wire, plants, modrock and getting mannequin hands from shops/amazon for the casts. 

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26/04/16

1. I had the idea to create a bunch of hands reaching up from the wire sculpture whilst water rained down onto it. We discussed having it fall from a drain pipe, or maybe getting a massive water balloon with a few tiny holes in it, but all seemed a little ambitious to be displayed at manchester art gallery. 

2. Still going with a self-watering piece, Nick drew a sculpture with drainpipes which would be able to flow throughout the piece, and we debated getting the audience to top up the water throughout the night of the exhibition. 

3. In his own time, Nick had the idea of having a wheel which would spin round and water our bust/body of the green man, but we realised it would take way too long to build. 

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I took out “Sculpture woods: studio grounds of Ann Morris” from the library to show to the green man group as I really liked Morris’s half-person leafy sculptures. If we decide to keep the half person half tree sculpture, we need to think of creative ways to mix the plant life with the human, perhaps having only a head, hand or leg on display.  

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Christina Chalmers makes ghost-like dresses using wire and natural resources she collects in forest, parks and beaches. Chalmers juxtaposes fragile and strong materials to in her work to present the differences in male and female roles throughout history. Our sculpture uses similar methods of sculpting man made and natural materials to create a piece about evolution, not just of our piece but of the earth.  

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Wire sculpture research- 

1&2 Antony Gormley 3&4 Unknown

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20/04/16

After the gallery tour, we were taken to the education room to pitch our projects to the gallery curators and staff about what we were planning to make, how and what the meaning was behind it. Unfortunately, Nick wasn’t present so the rest of the group and I had to pitch our ideas without his input. However Anna had brought along vines and moss samples to help use visualise what we’d be making. After having a brief chat about what we wanted to pitch before hand I went ahead and explained our concept; A bust of a metaphorical Green Man made out of wire filled and styled with moss and vines, as well as LED lights powered either by potatoes or salt-water batteries. All of our group have different ideas and issues for creating our sculpture and I think our project still needs a lot of work, but this project is about group work and developing ideas, and even if we run out of time to produce our proposed piece we can bring our unfinished concept to the gallery to demonstrate our creative input and ideas. We also had to consider how to make our piece bug free and how the visitors were going to interact with it. 

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20/04/16

1. James Capper creates machines inspired by animal and insect anatomy that can walk, climb, draw and even destroy whole blocks of concrete. Capper’s machines’ imitate life in their animalistic movements whilst simultaneously reminded us of their man-made element by their industrial aesthetics and sounds. Each machine has a creative function, the giant spider-like creature called ‘Telestep’ starches marks on a surface, and the beetle-like gnashes literally eat into massive blocks of concrete when Capper visits the gallery to demonstrate his work. I really love how his machines imitate creatures and it would be interesting if we could create or suggest movement somehow in our project.

2. Lynn Hershman Leeson’s ‘Agent Ruby,’ an artificially intelligent computer based robot which can be talked to by anyone, but you never get a response you’d expect.   

3. Tove Kjellmark’s robots that talk to each other inspired by an artist dream  

4.Mari Velonaki created two wheelchairs, which move independently around the room inspired by a Japanese story about a Fish and Bird, who have fallen in love but cannot successfully be together. The wheelchairs move around the room randomly, bash into each other unsuccessfully or spend time being far apart, like the original story. As they move around the room they print out romance inspired extracts of text, which falls to the floor for visitors to pick up and take home, this kind of interaction is something we need to think about for our piece.

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20/04/16

This week we visited the exhibition called “The Imitation Game” and exhibition curated by Claire Gannaway, and is about what it actually what it means to be alive. The exhibition is filled with artificial life in the forms of digital simulations, animal like robots, machines that right love letters and much more. Alan Turing once said: I propose to consider the question, “Can machines think?… Are there imaginable digital computers that would do well in the imitation game?” Alan Turing’s Turing Test, is a to test he created to figure out a computer’s ability to imitate human thought, inspiring the curator to give the exhibition its name and theme about machinery’s imitation of life. Our Thursday Late at Manchester Art Gallery needs to fit in with this theme, or at least have elements of both art and science, something we are planning to have in our Green Man sculpture.

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13/04/16

In my first official spectrum meet up we sat in our groups and began mind-mapping and discussing our ideas with the rest of the students and tutors involved in Project X. This was when I met Anna, a lady who is doing Post Grad in environmental sciences specialising in growing moss and different types of plant life. She offered to source the majority of the plants for our project and we came changed our piece so it was just half a man with arms out stretched and a head, which he talked about filling with lights and plants. I also brought a three books along, “Green man: the archetype of our oneness with the earth”,“Antony Gormley: blind light” and “Sculpture woods: studio grounds of Ann Morris” which provided good artist research for the project. We pitched our idea about the project being inspired by this half man half plant sculpture, and the other people in the group session suggested that we should think about all the different meanings of the Green Man and perhaps not focus on the figure being a man. It was suggested that we should make it genderless or not even a person at all which was something to consider for the next group meeting.