Author: Cassandra Tomerlin

Hi everyone,

This week I finished my project. The final design turned out a little different than I had imagined but it still has the same concept. From the beginning, if you remember, I was going with a theme of fire and ice. The wood spirals in an upward manner as fire would and the lights act as the ice.

For the most part the entire fixture is made from the driftwood I had found online. There is a metal rod that helped support the beginning of the design process. The base is a aluminum sheet that I had spray painted black and the light came from Amazon.

The fact that the lights have multiple color options made the sculpture more dramatic but my favorite is still the white light. Below are some pictures of the final piece. I hope you enjoy.

Cassie

 

Here is a really rough design for the sculpture. For the actual project I want to use drift wood that will curve a little more than the twigs and branches that I used here. It will also be more dense at the base so there won’t be as much empty space and the wiring for the lights can be hidden.

 

Shopping List:

• Driftwood
• Glass for the cube
• LED strip for interior wood
• Bulb for ice cube
• Stand/platform
• Pole to stabilize through middle and run wires

I decided to go with a theme of opposite attract such as Fire and Ice for my project. Being an architectural engineering major I wanted to create a lighting fixture with this project. I have come up with two different ideas, one being a pendant and the second being a tall modern art floor fixture.

Idea 1:

For this idea I took the first thing that came into my mind when I thought fire which was flames burning something. I pictured fire burning on a block of ice and the ice melting.

The fire would be made of felt looking similar to the picture below and beneath the flame there would be optical fibers hanging with glass or light pieces at the bottom to represent the water running down.

     

 

A sketch is shown here..

 

Idea 2:

This fixture would be larger and stand on the floor. It would be created with curved random wood/logged spiraling upward. The wood would be thin enough that you could see the light source creating a glowing effect through. But within the wood facing upwards there would be holes so the light could shine through onto the walls or ceiling. At the top of the wood would be a ice cube balancing on the tip and it would have its own light source. This would be created of glass blocks with an iceburg pattern and would be the main illuminance feature.

 

 

For many years Bruce Munro has recorded ideas and images in sketchbooks because he has always had an urge for reuse. His artwork is inspired by his interest in shared human experience and in result he is known for his immersive large scale light based pieces. Munro is trained in the manufacturing of light and produces intimate story-pieces as well as temporary experimental artworks.

Bruce Munro produces three main types of artwork; installations, sculptures, and commission.

Light Shower – installation

Bruce’s vision for this piece of art originated while he was in Scotland in 2008. He was sitting on the main stairs of the building absorbing the view of the snow capped mountains out ahead.  When it started raining the view became distorted from the interaction between the water and windows which is when the words “light” and “shower” registered in his mind. The first public exhibition for this piece was in 2010 and since he has created different versions of the piece.

Materials: Fiber optics, Acrylic, Light source

 

Mettabhavana – sculpture

This piece was conceived by Munro in the late 1990s. To this day, this piece is still a conceptual piece that is one of Munro’s life goals to build for the human experience. This artwork came to Munro in a dream one night when he was staying in a beach house in Barbados. He dreamt of a building where the walls were just softly glowing of light and it was unsure where the source was coming from. He had a sense of inner peace and unity and knew this building wasn’t just for him but for everyone. This would be a nondenominational space where people would unite and could meditate. He explained it as “drawing light back into the world, both literally and spiritually”. There would be no electricity and would be lit by the daylight during the day and by beeswax candles at night.

Here is a link to a video of the artwork: https://vimeo.com/43125794

 

Impression: Time Crossing Culture – commission

Munro wanted this piece to reflect the museums cultural history and collections but also interact with the users. Another intent for this piece was to pull the users attention towards the welcome space in the museum. His inspiration for the piece was the overall concept of time. Each of the rings represents one of the 12 numbers on a clock while the each sphere is representative of the Earth. The fixture is also overlayed with a digital animation that casts moving images through the spheres onto the floor.

Materials: Acrylic, Light

Art Experience:

Being an architectural engineering major I have always loved the concept of combining art with human living/interaction. However, I have never been the best at drawing and have always loved technology and math and therefore found the perfect major for me.

My humanities depth is in art history because being an architectural major I love learning about where certain styles originated from. However, I am in this class because I wanted to put my creativity to work. Light is a aspect in life that most people take for granted and don’t notice in their day to day routine which means if a user notices a great piece of light art the artist has done their job well.

At this school I have taken a few artistic classes such as drafting classes for my major both hand drawing and computer software based (Revit and AutoCAD) and photoshop shop classes. Here are a few of my works..

 

Photoshop:

 

AutoCAD: Design of a building facade system

 

I have a few hand drawings but I can not locate them right now. I will upload them when I find them.

Other Creative Arts:

Other creative arts that I enjoy include painting, photography, and crafting. I love painting on canvas, creating recycled art for housing décor, and making blankets.

Artistic Goals and Inspirations:

Some of my inspirations come from nature and abstract objects I see in day to day life. My artistic goals when creating pieces of art are to catch the viewers eye. I enjoy when someone looks at an art piece and has to think about it and take a second look.

Recent Creative Projects:

One of my recent projects I am proud of would have to be my MQP. This campus does not have a designated building for architectural engineering majors so my MQP team is a designing a building on the piece of land between the library and fuller. The architectural aspect is not as creative as we would have liked to design it because we only had a short amount of time to do so. Along with the architectural design we are designing the structural and mechanical systems.

Here is a render of the initial stages. The design is more defined now. The building on the left is the library, to the right in Kaven, and up above is fuller.