Clear, Green and Brown glass

This is the first attempt at resolving the module system that exists in my head. I imagine this system might be self supporting, for application primarily in decorative sculptural lighting but it could have applications beyond this realm. I imagine the modules would be cast using bottles and I guess the effect would be enhanced with an application in lighting.

Design Copyright © 2010 Youssef Daoud

It is starting to remind me of a clumsy version of a lego set, not sure how I'm feeling about it.

More cutlery...

Title Cutlery Candelabra
Artist Osian Batyka-Williams
Description
Discarded cutlery is used to create natural forms in these candelabras. Floral shadows are created by the silhouette of the piece, growing larger the lower the candles burn.

Title Cutlery Chair
Artist Osian Batyka-Williams
Description
Some restaurants change their cutlery as often as every nine months. The Cutlery Chair utilises these hard to recycle, unwanted cutlery pieces as building blocks to create truly unique pieces of functional furniture.
Source www.osianbatykawilliams.com

I'm not sure what the fascination with cutlery is, could it be that this is one of the most personal yet public of everyday objects? Designed to be used over and over again, here this intended cycle stops or continues in a different way?

Tom Hill

'Tom Hill is a 23 year-old self-taught sculptor who for the last 3 years has been working with recycled horseshoes to create life-size animal sculptures. Tom utilises a gas forge, anvil and hammer as well as various welding techniques to heat and shape the horseshoes to create his sculptures.'



Title Race Horse No.2
Date 2008
Source www.tomhillsculpture.com

This is interesting because here the material being re-appropriated informs the subject of the work itself. Before seeing this I thought about producing a bust of the queen using one penny coiins, we'll see if I get round to it or if its a thought which should remain just a thought.

Tom Price

Understanding material properties and how materials will react to certain processes requires some intellect along with much experimental bravery. This piece by Tom Price shows a combination of these two qualities.



Piece Meltdown Chair PP Blue Rope
Date 2007
Description
This chair is created by heating and pressing a seat-shaped former into a ball of polypropylene rope. The rope begins to liquify as it comes into contact with the heated former and, as it cools, it sets in the shape of a seat creating a contrast in form and texture to the remaining rope. No additional material has been added to make the seat - it is all made from melted rope.
Video www.youtube.com
Source www.tom-price.com

Media & Viewpoints

It is no secret that media reporting on almost anything always has a bias, agenda or a vision. I am not against media reporting, on the contrary, I think it is great that in the world we live in today we have an awareness of what is happening across the globe. I associate the media with having opinions (social, political, economic etc) on reporting. In some cases this is site-specific to the place that is the subject or to the place that is the source. One area where this opinion is very powerfull and effective is in mass culture.

I feel that as a person of British/Egyptian Nationality, I am aware of two very different 'worlds' these are not actually 'worlds' apart and I am sure that there exist very similar circumstantial extremes of wealth and poverty, health and illness, safety and crime etc. In the context of my work, these viewpoints that I am personally aware of I envisage having a spatial consequence. I imagine this might manifest itself as a physical positioning of the viewer as in anamorphic projection perhaps or this might present as a simple visual effect as in the viewing of the columns in St Peter's in Rome. I am interested in the idea of having to look for meaning within spatial experiences which implies finding only what the viewer wants to find. Through movement the viewer has more exposure and more opportunity to explore the work.

This painting is a good illustration. I saw it recently myself and it made me think.

Title Madonna
Artist Slavador Dali
Date 1958
Photograph Amir Daoud

'Madonna is one of several works Dalí made after 1941 that uses classical imagery as the basis for Surrealist invention. Here, he paints two different simultaneous subjects with a profusion of gray and pink dots: a Madonna and Child based on Raphael's Sistine Madonna (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, after 1513), and a large ear, whose ridged interior surface is defined by the presence of these two figures. Each motif is designed to come into focus at a different distance. At close range, the painting looks completely abstract; from about six feet away, it reveals the Madonna and Child; and from fifty feet, it is what the artist called "the ear of an angel." To the left of the main images is a trompe-l'oeil detail of a red cherry suspended on a string from a torn and folded piece of paper; its shadow is cast onto another piece of paper bearing the signature of the artist.'

Source www.metmuseum.org

To summarise, my work will strive to embody ideas surrounding the following.
Media representation
Re-appropriation and Recycling
Lighting design
Hierarchy
Consumption, Consumerism and Capitalism

Arman

Accumulations and dissection of object is what Arman is most well known for. The body of work (that which is photographed on his website) is evidence of the his vision to accumulate, organise and assemble objects.

Title The Spirit of Yamaha
Date 1997
Description
Sliced actual piano with two complete motorcycle
Source www.arman.com

'Sculptor and painter whose best works and ideas kept the ability to surprise and delight for more than half a century.

THE artist Arman was associated in the public mind with his trademark handling of his materials: objects would be excitingly destroyed and then presented, often repetitively, stuck on board or canvas or reassembled in some striking fashion.

But Arman was no one-trick pony. If some of his pieces could seem formulaic, the work he produced in a career lasting nearly 60 years sustained a real ability to surprise and delight. And some of it was truly iconic, like the famous Long Term Parking, a towering monument made of scrapyard cars set in concrete. Or the Martyrs' Monument in Beirut, which applied the same treatment to tanks. Or even, more modestly, the towers of old clocks and suitcases that greet travellers outside St Lazare station, Paris. Arman was a maker of sardonic or gleeful totems, and, like the Pop artists with whom he was so often associated, very much a product of the postwar boom years.

...

By the mid-1960s Arman was hot artistic property. He experimented with more spectacular ways of treating objects, smashing them for his Coleres (rages), sawing them into slices for his Coupes (cuts) or, as Klein had done, by going at the canvas with a blowtorch and setting the result in resin (Combustions). These works were taut with the tension between the semi-vandalistic violence that produced them and the strangely pleasing result, between the intense energy of the process and the final repose. There was also a kind of melancholy, too, associated with the discarded and exhausted.'

Date October 27, 2005, Thursday
Source The Times (London)

Title Hope for Peace
Location Beirut, Lebanon
Date 1976
Description
Army tanks and armoured vehicles ambedded in concrete. 30 m - 4000 tonnes. Beyrouth, district of Yarzé, Lebanon.
Five thousand tons of concrete, 30 meters high, clasped around 78 tanks, jeeps and various artillery parts : this was Arman's very last monumental sculpture, erected in Beirut, in front of the Ministry of Defence. It is a works which strongly denounces the follies of man, with its defiantly ironic title "Hope for Peace". By its size, its cut, its harmonious appearance, it is a remarkable reflection of the image of a city which had long been reduced to the vision of buildings in ruins...
Source www.armanstudio.com

Breakdown

Artist Michael Landy
Location London
Date 2001
Source www.youtube.com

The artist speaks about his work so there isn't much that I can say except for the themes that are relevant to my own work. These themes and ideas include consumerism, consumption, capitalism and belonging.