void life void essay

This project from the start was tricky for me as I hated the idea of nothingness but i gripped this project with both hands and I believe I created a decent final piece.
This project was massive and we could explore every corner of void life void from the micro to the macro but I chose to work with light, the light of life as my starting point.

I started by looking at all types of light such as the light hitting down into a well, also the sky window created by James Turrell currently exhibited in Yorkshire sculpture park, I also looked at the tree of life. Then i got an idea of people and animals combined with light. I looked at Makoto Tojiki's work with his light sculptures of animals and males, which followed into looking at light sculptures.

I believe all my research up to this point has pushed me into finding Mihoko Ogaki's amazing LED light sculptures. She creates plastic fibre-reinforced models of a human figure and fills with lights to show her theme of life, death and rebirth. Finding this artist helped me a lot as this was the starter to creating my piece. What really caught me about Ogaki's sculptures was how the lights created the image of a person, I found it amazing and I relate it strongly to the essence of life, what creates a human but also how innocent her sculptures seem.

After researching thoroughly I had decided to create my own piece strongly influenced by Ogaki's work. So I started  testing how to make the glimpses of light. I tried holding black paper in front of light and piercing little holes, it worked but it wasn't the effect I really wanted. so I re-thought my idea and how I could make it work, I drew a story board to see what my idea would look like then create a short animation out of it which helped massively because it showed what I was doing right and what I was doing wrong. I came up with the idea of creating a clay model and flicking paint on to form the illusion of stars inside the body and the essence of life. But then I had another problem, the lighting and how I was going to get the right effect I wanted. So after a lot of thinking i painted my model white and had it placed on a white background and flicked black paint to create the stars. After 350 frames in stop motion I took the sequence into after effects where I inverted the animation so it was black background with white stars and I went through each of the 350 frames and masked out all the shadows to get only the stars. Once I was happy I added the effect of glow which helped massively because the stars looked like they were glowing and it lit up the piece making it look really realistic.

I believe reflecting on my piece I could have done further research into other areas of void life void to get a varied choice of ideas but ultimately I created a really decent piece that, in my eyes represents void life void and that is what I was attempting to capture.