Synthesis, materials, surface and structural possibilities.

When I worked on the Foundation Course at Leeds College of Art or the Jacob Kramer College as it was then, one of the most useful three dimensional sessions was one whereby we set up a situation that forced a joined synthesis of different constructional materials followed by an exploration their environmental structural possibilities.

In order to do this we needed two things to be in place. The studio had to already be enlivened with a range of good sized 3D objects and we needed large amounts of materials that could be explored using multiples of units that had an ability to be extended across a surface by some sort of duplication. For instance, tape can be cut into equal lengths and stuck to something else. If enough pieces of tape are cut and a process developed to do the same thing over and over again, the tape will eventually be seen as having a structural potential. A thousand pieces of tape 2 inches long, each one attached to the bottom half of a matchstick, can then be joined to another thousand pieces of tape each one attached to the bottom half of a lollypop stick. A flowing, but unique looking surface may then arise that has come into being by careful crafting and thinking about the consequences of the join. 

We often used matchsticks, lollypop sticks and tape because it was reasonably easy to obtain large multiples of these, but we also used office supplies, (paperclips, post it notes, luggage ties, balls of string, postcards, different types of fasteners, sellotape, plastic ties, hole punches, staplers, drawing pins, wire) and anything else that students might have access to, for instance one student who had a contact in the market one year acquired hundreds of empty egg boxes and moulded paper mache trays for carrying fruit, others had contacts in various engineering works and could get piles of offcuts, all of which had to be the same, some students somehow managed to get bags full of bottle tops, or buttons. However no matter what the material was, it needed to be of enough quantity to make a significant visual presence when joined with something else and extended over a large surface area. 

At the time (1980s) the work of the Ghanian sculptor El Anatsui was unknown to us, but his working method of using vast amounts of wire and bottle tops would have been a perfect example to give to students as to how this sort of research could lead to powerful work in its own right.  

El Anatsui: Details of surfaces

Part one of a session was to explore whatever materials you had been given. Usually two types of materials were provided, as well as access to basic hand tools, such as pliers, scissors, hammers, saws, craft knives, bradawls, hole punches, hand drills etc. First of all you had to explore possibilities of a single material being able to be joined to itself. For instance string could be cut into lengths and knots then used to tie itself together. Tape might be stuck to tape, a lollypop stick split and another one inserted into the split, or two splits could be spliced together. Then the other material was to be explored, the test being could this material be extended to cover a surface? The next phase was what happened when you brought your two materials together? Could a more complex and robust joining system be invented? In the case of the El Anatsui examples above, wire and small metal units such as bottle tops or metal labels, have holes punched into them and wire is used as the joining material. 

Students were then put into pairs and again the materials were tested out, now they had four material possibilities and they had to work out which combination worked most effectively to produce a robust surface, one that could be extended indefinitely and that was aesthetically interesting. Once this had been accomplished, these pairs of students had to work as if they were on a factory production line and they had to produce enough components in order to produce a material that could cover a minimum of a two metre square. 

Students were then asked to team up with another pair, they were given space in the studio that included at least one large object that had already been made, as well as floor and wall space. They were asked to use their building skills to cover wall, floor and object, one pair having a starting point on the left the other on the right, or one pair beginning above the other, for instance one would begin by attaching their growing surface to a wall and the other the floor. As they advanced this surface it had to be able to integrate the given object and as one way of working began to meet another, be capable of gradually synthesising and accommodating the materials and aesthetic of the met material and structuring process.  So for instance, one pair of students might be making a surface not unlike the one El Anatsui had invented by linking bottle tops with wire and another two students might have developed a surface made of drawing pins pushed into a surface of electrical tape. Perhaps something like the surface developed by Jan Fabre below. 

Jan Fabre

Because students were working with a wide variety of materials, these surfaces evolved in interesting ways and particularly so as they began to merge into each other. However the other issue was how objects, walls and floors began to become transformed. As you can see from the Jan Fabre example above, what could have been a very ordinary sculpture of a boy, is made into something totally different by being covered in a surface made of drawing pins and if the floor and or walls were also included, the transformation could be even more powerful. 

Jan Fabre

Jan Fabre is an artist who also works in the theatre and so is very aware of the theatrical transformational potential of surfaces, in the case above he uses the shed wing cases of iridescent beetles to transform a wheelchair into an object of mystery. 

At the point when we developed these sessions students were still in the first few weeks of the course and we usually asked students to make large items, such as giant vegetables, or household tools during the summer break, which were brought into the studios in the first week and used as subject matter from which to make drawings. Now these objects would become totally transformed and not only that, they would have a totally different relationship between the floors and walls of the studio. As these surfaces were built, students had to decide where and how they ended. Did they for instance stop exactly halfway across an object? Did they stop at a perfectly drawn curved edge, or at a straight line or did they have a very ragged, dispersed edge quality? Finally all the detritus and tools would be cleared from the studio and we would critique the work as if it was a contemporary sculpture exhibition. 

Various variations of this approach were made over different years, we tried to never exactly repeat what we had done the year before, as it quickly became predictable. But the basic issues of jointing, surface development, formal transformation and material specificity were always in the mix, as well as team work and the need at some point within the process to have to manufacture enough material to ensure that a perceived physical change would happen, because enough of a surface had been produced to effect change. 

Some of the surfaces made were fantastic and the work done in those days was powerful and the lessons learnt were deep ones. However I never took photographs and I don't know who did, as these were the days before the mobile phone and it felt as if it was in the doing and not the recording that lessons were learnt. A situation that would not happen now, as it often feels that everything depends on having a good image to send out to social media sites. 

An installation by Croatian design collective use/numen

The implications for the work done by foundation students undertaking the project often led to installations not too dissimilar to the one above, which uses rolls and rolls of sellotape to develop a material that once it becomes structural, takes on a life far beyond its use to stick two pieces of paper together. 

See also:

Texture: between drawing and sculpture

The structure of the Foundation Course

From 2D to 3D

I mentioned in the previous post about 3D colour illusions that the colour forms might be built over the remains of a previous set of structures, such as 3D forms made from the synthesis of two different materials and their structural possibilities. The development of ongoing projects designed to flow from one to another was another central feature of first term Foundation work. These could be quite complex as they were engineered to generate a wide ranging set of experiences, experiences designed on the one hand to help students diagnose their abilities and on the other to introduce essential issues such as how to work with materials, control colour or use drawing to develop ideas.

Because we tried to develop different ways of doing this each year, what we came up with tends to blur in my mind into an ever changing set of morphing projects. However I will try and single a few out and perhaps more importantly, explain how one would lead to another so that an idea of what we were doing emerges. Above all it was important to get over to the students the idea of how different processes could be used to drive ideas forward, in particular how the setting of limitations to work within could generate invention and create new forms.

Typically an initial drawing set-up would gradually evolve to include making and colour experiences. Each set of experiences would generate work that could be then processed to produce another body of work. Sometimes a stand-alone experience might be introduced in parallel to something ongoing and then fed into the mix. For instance students might be asked to select a small part of an existing line drawing. They are to then visualise this element as if it is extended or extruded into 3D space. They might be given a simple isometric or perspective box structure to visualise this within. Because the initial drawing is a plan view with no indication as to whether one side is higher or lower than another, students are asked to explore the various possibilities and to come up with several images, some looking at the possibilities as if the object is a solid, others as if it has walls and an empty interior. These drawings might then be left pinned to the walls and a variety of building materials introduced into the studio (these were typically large rolls and piles of cardboard, bags of lollypop sticks, balls of string, bags of clean matchsticks, rolls of sellotape, masking tape and coloured tapes, boxes of paperclips, drawing pins and other office equipment such as rubber bands etc), or a collection of multiple units that students had been asked to collect over the previous couple of weeks. (Typically students would bring in piles of egg boxes, cardboard boxes, lots of old books, piles of old cassette tapes, cans or boxes of matches). Students would then be asked to explore the possibilities inherent in the materials either given to them or which they had themselves sourced. (From what I remember, we tended to provide materials the more student numbers grew because we didn’t have the time to deal with the serendipity of odd and strange materials). Structural integrity and truth to materials were buzz terms and students were encouraged to engineer solutions to problems such as how tall can your object grow or how wide a span can it achieve? As students became more confident with the materials, secondary factors such as surface treatment and jointing became more important. For instance a student making a joint between two pieces of cardboard using paperclips might be asked to explore how the holes needed to accept the paperclips could become a surface texture, or how the metal of the paperclip could be twisted in a regular manner so that if lots of these were used in a regular and controlled manner, a joint could become a rhythmic seam. We tended to supply ‘office’ materials to make the point that every material had potential and that all materials carried with them a set of signifiers or associations that would affect the final read of something. Gradually the original materials would be transformed, sellotape now being used to create systematically laid down flat layers that are put together like plywood and jointed with rolled edges fixed with rows of tightly compacted elastic bands, or sheets of cardboard, sanded back to reveal their internal structure, perforated by regular holes  and jointed with string ties, piles of egg boxes sawn and sanded to reveal their internal structure with joints studded with drawing pins etc etc.

Once these objects had been constructed and of course critiqued then students would be asked to re-introduce their drawings into the situation and to see what would happen if the building principles they had invented could be used to construct the images they had previously drawn. What would happen of course would be that the limitations of the materials would change the forms yet again. Students were asked to think through the scale implications of the materials, matchsticks for instance, were unlikely to result in huge constructions. As these new forms started to arrive we would get students to ‘push’ the implications, how far could any particular quality be taken? This could be surface appearance, scale, internal structure etc.

The next stage in the transformation, would often involve team working, students using different materials typically being paired together and asked to create new forms from a synthesis between their two languages. At this point we often encouraged a more architectural or environmental approach, asking students to have an ambition for the work and allowing it to grow across the floor and over a wall. Considerations as to how one material met another was vital, a joint might perhaps start being made of regular hinges of twisted paperclips and then gradually become interspersed with elastic band ties, which would gradually take precedence until the joint was composed entirely of these ties. The same effect might be happening across the surfaces, a plane of drawing pins in cardboard perhaps gradually thinning out and being replaced by sellotape sheets. As constructions grew they would start to meet others and as they did so we asked the students to continue the structures using the same rules of engagement. (These structures might well be the ones that in a next transformation would become cut through with colour shapes, see previous post )

Again a whole raft of issues were embedded in these sessions. Process was of course key, draw something, make from it, change the materials, make it again, work with someone else, combine two different ways of working etc. Students would also realise that every situation is a source for materials, the office is of course very handy as a supply, but at some point this could be the factory, the garden, the farmyard or a dentist or domestic house interior. Students also learn that materials themselves also only gradually reveal their potential, sellotape doesn’t at first sight appear to be a good building material, but when you start to build with it you learn how it can be worked and how as a material it has huge possibilities. One key thing we wanted students to understand was that jointing and the ‘ending’ of forms are both vital. In crits we would point to how everything is jointed, for instance, the cuffs of shirts are stitched in a particular way and the material folded to take that stitch, you can then turn the shirt inside out and see how the same seam is very different in appearance on the inside. The cuff makes a natural visual ‘end’ to the form of the shirt sleeve and we would then perhaps look at other examples of this in the real world. How the sole of a shoe meets the sides, how a table leg is fitted to the table surface, how it meets the ground etc. etc. would be pointed to and we would point out how the visual ‘rightness’ of that moment often came with a change in the form. This could be as simple as a rubber stopper in the end of a metal tube or the frame around a door.

Critiques as always were vital and changes in meaning as each construction was examined were highlighted, especially when the unpredictable was happening, such as very ‘domestic’ materials being transformed to give intimations of a rocky landscape or a field being swept up in a windstorm.

The deeper issue was that by working through something and paying attention to every detail whatever was produced would have a certain authenticity and rightness. By using a process you didn’t have to have a preconceived idea, you just had to work through each problem as it arrived. The bringing together one set of issues (2D drawing) with another (3D thinking) was also opened out further in critiques, students being reminded that this was a fundamental tool for invention, and no different to the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.

I shall return to this type of session again, because there were many variations of this idea and each year we tried to ring the changes in order to stop things getting predictable for ourselves. However as the course got bigger and bigger gradually some of these processes became embedded as core themes, especially if they could be handled by a wide range of staff all ‘singing from the same hymn tune’.