I went to the metal workshops this morning and made this piece with the rollers. I’ve talked it over with Gay and said I wanted the metal sheet (10cm in width) curved similar to a concertina with the rollers, and she said it’s not as straightforward. I saw why that was when I was about to put the metal through – the metal would curve into a C shape, and it wouldn’t work by rolling the metal partially out. We ended up taking one of the rollers out the machine, and inserting the sheet at different intervals to curve the metal.

The metal took an interesting shape that was different than my initial plan. I think that’s the difference with working on digital, and working with a physical material. With the digital, I have a lot more control over the medium, whereas with the metal, there’s physical factors and constraints to take into consideration.

Me and Gay talked about the work after. She said it looked like it was in motion, and it wasn’t still, which I agreed because the curves is a representation of movement, applied to a still object. I thought the sculpture (first image) looked like a chair. A chair symbolises the absence of human presence; critiquing its own condition as a three-dimensional object.

I’m still going to call it Words are like toothpaste, because it’s a poetic title that goes well with the fluidity of the metal sheet, and toothpaste is gel that takes after the shape of a container, similar to how the sounds of words are molded by the mouth.

I’m going to photoshop the structure to different surroundings as well as the gallery spaces in the School of Art. I want to place it in different surroundings because I recently saw the news of a monolith structure appearing, then disappearing in the locations of Utah and in Romania.

It referenced Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, where a black screen-like structure appears in a prehistoric setting, which is to comment on the impact of the 21st Century on the evolution of mankind.