ucs

the name suits the piece as vanitas is the latin name for vanity and my work is all about looking past that surface image and to what lies beneath.

for my assesment work i have layed out all the important experiments and pieces throughout the 3rd year.

including my small resin men and off cuts of resin experiments.

and so i belive this is it, the end , for now of this blogging process .

theres been ups and downs, tears and laughter, and just a few swearing matches thrown in :P

but over all its been good i feel my work has moved forward in leaps and bounds and my meaning has finally shone through.

so wish me luck…..

ive finally got round to peeling the resin of the silicon plastic and it came off beautifully, the resin was crystal clear and smooth as water.

i layed the larger pieces down underneath the hand, loosed the droplets and just shook them off around the main pools, it loks stunning the way the light captues each tiny drop.

i looked at putting a spot light on to the other fragmented resin piece but couldnt find anything sutiable when one of the technitions came up with the idea of putting a light inside of the plinth so i found a sutibale led light that was battery powered and drilled holes underneath the resin so the light shined up from underneath.

this solves the problem of not having enough light but too much with two strip lights.

for my bottle for the room that each of us personalise, i outlined the bottle in charcoal and filled the bottle with icing sugar so it stands stark next to the black.

i next had to come up with a name for the finished piece to tie the seperate sides of the room together and to give the audience a clue with what my work is about.

i have choosen the name ;

“Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas”

Transience of life, futility of vanity, the certainty of death.

this comes from the term vanitas

In the arts, vanitas is a type of symbolic work of art especially associated with still life painting in Flanders and the Netherlands in the 16th and 17th centuries, though also common in other places and periods. The Latin word means “vanity” and loosely translated corresponds to the meaninglessness of earthly life and the transient nature of all earthly goods and pursuits. Ecclesiastes 1:2;12:8 from the Bible is often quoted in conjunction with this term.^[1] The Vulgate (Latin translation of the Bible) renders the verse as Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas.^{[Eccl. 1:2;12:8]} The verse is translated as Vanity of vanities; all is vanity by the King James Version of the Bible. Vanity is used here in its older (especially pre-14th century) sense of “futility”.^[2] Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless is the rendering by The New International Version of the Bible.

Common vanitas symbols include skulls, which are a reminder of the certainty of death; rotten fruit, which symbolizes decay; bubbles, which symbolize the brevity of life and suddenness of death; smoke, watches, and hourglasses, which symbolize the brevity of life; and musical instruments, which symbolize brevity and the ephemeral nature of life. Fruit, flowers and butterflies can be interpreted in the same way, and a peeled lemon, as well as accompanying seafood was, like life, attractive to look at, but bitter to taste. There is debate among art historians as to how much, and how seriously, the vanitas theme is implied in still-life paintings without explicit imagery such as a skull. As in much moralistic genre painting, the enjoyment evoked by the sensuous depiction of the subject is in a certain conflict with the moralistic message.

eloise corbett

left to do i have;

make and print laybels

sort out assesment stuff

print this blog :)

clear out any remaining things

sort out bottle

peel resin of plastic and arrange.

i have finally decided on only having one light inside the room, after playing with the idea of two lights. but it was just too light and killed the fragmented bone piece by being too bright.

the other thing i had to debate was that one of the lines had stretched a lot less then the others and in turn was hanging a lot higher. i could either tighten 3 up or let the high one down slightly so thats what i decided to do, let one down. this ment that they were still slightly different which i wanted to keep but not so different that the audience would struggle to read the bigger picture.

i also quite like the spacing around the stacks as its big enough that each one looks like a seperate piece untill you stand back and view all four. its broken enough that you have to work at deciphering it but clear enough you can work it out.

the next job i had to do was string the lines from the ceiling, i enlisted the help of a friend to drill the rings and hooks into the wall, i then prepared the line and tied it on to one end, stretching it across the room, running it through another ring, tieing it to a ring and hooking it to another hook on the wall.

i then precedded to decide where to hang the boards and hung them. i liked the look of the piece but and wanted it on the side of mimamlist but it looked a little too empty, so i looked at putting framed iron pictures around the walls but decided i didnt like the look as it made the audience turn their backs on the piece and drew them away from the main piece.

i then looked at where exsactly the room looked empty and layed two markers on the floor where i though it needed something.

i then looked through my pieces and made a choice that i would add one plinth with a resin bone hanging above it and on the plinth broken and fragmented shards of other bones.

the other i had a harder time trying to work out what exsactly to put there, i tryed another plinth but there was something about it that just looked ugly and to promident within the delicate room.

I finally decided on hanging a bone hand but without a plinth and pouring resin over it letting it swing gently creating a seamless smooth puddle on the floor. i was pleased with this effect and the contrast between the broken and the perfection of the second.

first with this piece i decided to test how to mount the pictures on to the foam board, at first i thought i could heat press on to both sides but when i tryed this the double heating process caused the first side to peel away.

so i went back to the drawring board, and thought i might try spray mount but thought the image would crumple, when a friend suggested that i should use two pieces of thinner board and stick them together.

so i precedeeded to heat press each seperate one and glue them together with wood glue, i then had to trim each one which i had problems with as i couldnt get a clean line on the board. so i had to get one of the techinitions to give me a hand.

the next thing i had to do was to glue all the hooks in, at first i only glued them in part way to leave to hook free but when i tested them they werent strong enough and fell out. so i went to a fishing shop and found some small black clips to use.

I then proceeded to remove all the hooks and re glue them imbedding them fully into the foamboad with the clips already on. this looked better and was much much stronger.

i then had to decide what was best for covering up the stark white sides of the foam board i tryed 3 methords, card, tape, and paint. the paint did not work as it was to shiny and picked up the flaws in the foam board, the card worked but was time consuming and had a lot of room for error, so i went with insulation tape sticking it on the edge and scalpling around the edges.

with every methord except the paint the area around the hook is left white so i purchased a permanent marker and coloured in the white patches, so under the one strip light the white patches dont show up as bad.