Interpretation

I liked this project because it was a material I'm sure everyone was new to working with, soda cans.  The soda cans were interesting not only because they were metal, but because they had a shape of their own already, and certain properties that allowed or inhibited the design.  Actually, because the cans were so hard to work with at points, they actually ended up changing my design.

I originally had the idea of making something somehow involved with nature.  I was not sure if I was going to exactly replicate nature or not, but in my first idea, a beehive, I was going to make the shape of the bee hive and hang it suggestively in a tree.  This did not work out.  I decided to play with the cans and see what I could make, and ended up with these spiky bundles made from the tops of the cans. 

 I also liked stringing together the little pieces of the cans 

to make chains, which I hung from the bottoms of the spiked balls.  Once I hung this in the tree, it looked great, but also left its meaning up to the viewer. One could say they look like pinecones since I hung them in a pine tree.   I also added more elements to the set to make it seem like a collection of sculpture incorporated into nature by making little green metal strips bound into a bundle then spread out to look like pine needles.  These are visible in several of the pictures.

Another thing I liked about hanging the metal sculpture in a natural tree was the contrast created by the two. I am sure when people look into trees, they do not expect to see metal, and not only does this grab the viewers attention, but makes them wonder what this sculp

ture implies or resembles by being incorporated with nature.

I was originally planning on hanging the sculpture in a tree on West Campus, around the Bryan Center.  But when I tried to ask administrators if I could borrow a ladder to hang something, when they found they told me I couldn't hang sculpture, and when I said I had to do it anyway for a class, they said they would just take it down.  So this was an interesting interaction with public art and Duke, and implied that the trees and the grounds were more important than the expression of art on campus.  

So I went to the Duke Gardens instead. This was better actually because it offered better viewing space and better variety of trees.  At the gardens, I was not sure if hanging my sculpture was allowed, but I figured I would hang it anyway and let them take it down.  When I was hanging it, some people looked on with passive interest, while some people looked confused or looked at me strangely.  I thought this was interesting, but because my sculpture was abstract, I wasn't too surprised.  Hanging the piece was actually easy with just wire, and the sculpture is still up in the gardens for as long as they will allow it to be there, and I was happy to give people something to look at and interpret in the Gardens.

This is a picture of the sculpture as a whole: