Photographed above is a sculpture I created for my 3D Design & Color class. I call this piece No Place Like Home. It was inspired by the film A Ghost Story (2018), and by the works of artist Do Ho Suh. No Place Like Home is made out of wooden dowels, laser cut and painted masonite, sheer white fabric, and fishing line.
When creating this piece, I wanted to create something that was about the concept of home and the connections that humans make with physical places. The frame of the boxes is meant to represent the structural aspect of a home. Physically, the structural aspect is solely a structure, but it can be filled with people and memories and emotions. The sheer fabric is meant to represent these memories, visibly there, but transparent as they fade as time moves on and people move on.
When brainstorming and drawing up ideas for this sculpture, I had many different ideas. The one thing that seemed to stick with all my ideas was that I definitely wanted triangles and connections.
There was a lot of trial and error when it came to laser cutting. My first prototype was laser cut out of foam core. I need to create a system where three shapes could interlock with one another in order to connect. In the first round of laser cutting, there was only one tooth on each side of the triangle pieces, which wasn't enough to keep it sturdy, so I ended up having two teeth on each side. I also initially planned to connect all the corner structures with laser cut masonite, but the masonite pieces weren't strong enough to support the weight, so I switched to wooden dowels, having to change the holes from square to circle. On the last round of laser cutting, I found one final error in my design: when the dowels connected different corners, they overlapped and would not be able to fit. In order to solve this problem, I whittled out sections of dowels that would need to overlap. This ended up being a good save.
After the structure was assembled and painted black, I had to attach the sheer fabric and fishing wire.
In order to give this sculpture more meaning, I photographed it in the first place I considered home: the yard of my childhood home, a cabin in the woods. I hung the sculpture from a tree, climbed a ladder, and took a series of photos.
Below is some of the inspiration for this piece (Artwork by Do Ho Suh, and film A Ghost Story (2018) directed by David Lowery):
