This will be a quick update this week because week #3 was very much the second part of what took place last week; visual construction for the Playces sculptures. This time it was all about detail. After establishing the core structural foundations for the new sculptures last week, it was time to develop the illustrative qualities of the sculptures, pushing them from familiar (but bland) structures, and transforming them into more descriptive, detailed visual artworks. So cardboard cutting went from large-scale surfaces to small-scale details: pipes, railings, bricks, roof tiles, window arches, stalactites, staircases, billboards, and so on:
The trick with this phase was to know where to stop. How much detail was required to make them feel illustrative or descriptive enough? There was always more to do, but it dawned on me towards the end of the week that fundamentally the sculptures were working at two levels of visual resolution: 1). A top-level profile (i.e. the general shape and scale; appreciated/acknowledged at a distance) 2). The fine-grained detail (i.e. objects, fixings, and textures; appreciated/acknowledged up close) ...so, anything that went beyond this (detail on the detail for example) was simply a step too far and absolutely not necessary for the aesthetics of this project. So there they are in all their recycled glory, ready to move beyond the single sensory modality of sight, and into the realms of sound, movement, and interactivity - let the playing begin.