Project 3: Site, Place, and Installation

My first sculpture that I made outside was a heart made out of little pebbles that I had found along the shoreline at the point.

In my next sculpture I used dandelions to make another heart shape in the grass.

By this time I realized that I didn't just want the sculptures to emphasize the materials' own presence in the landscape where I had place it, but I wanted them to leave an essence of my own personal presence. For my next sculpture I attempted to use flower petals in a fountain and try to shape the clusters in the shape of my shadow in the fountain, but that didn't work out as easily as I thought it would. The wind and the slight trickle of water into the fountain kept moving all of the petals around, so I decided that making yet another heart shape would be easiest.

But the much simpler heart shape didn't even prove to be very easy either, so I ended up making a structure from little wooden sticks to put the heart shape on.

Near this fountain in the Garden of Remembrance there was a tree whose flowers had mostly fallen to the ground around it. I noticed that the petals of the flowers had different colors on either side of each petal and I thought it would be interesting to work with them.

While making the heart, I thought that these petals would be really great to use with my prior idea of leaving a trace of my body's presence in the work I created, to literally have my touch as the artist to be the artwork in itself. So I taced the outline of my own body with the petals.

In my next sculpture, I also wanted to leave my body's presence behind but didn't want to have my whole body visible in the sculpture. I just wanted parts, but have the parts be able to resemble enough what my body was doing in that space. There is a little brick thing underneath a tree outside of Caroline, the dorm in which I live, where I often sit to read or think. It's also a common place where I see others sitting as well, so I thought that these other people's interaction with the piece would make it more alive in a sense.

In this picture, you can really see my presence in the space, and the fact that I used such bright, vibrant petals really makes it stand out. If I had for instance used the dead, brown leaves, I don't think it would have been as interactive as it turned out to be, and probably would have been disturbed more. I actually saw people sitting around it as if there was a person in the spot where I had been and they even interacted with it by adding dandelions in the feet.

I have often sat and wondered when in a place, how many people have been here before me? And I think that this allows someone who walks by and sees it to become aware of other people's presence in the space and their impact, whether that is slight or drastic, in the space as well.

I also made a very similar sculpture out of grass on a bench, but I didn't really like how it looked, especially since in all of my previous sculptures, I had used more aesthetically pleasing materials, like all of the petals.