Second Year: First Project. Zabriskie Point Stage 4, Making

To create the Heart sculpture involes using wire mesh to create the outer shell and overall structure of what the sculpture will be. It can then be reinforced as necessary in order to strengthen the sculpture and enable me to create a surface across the wire so that the mirror shards can be fixed to.

The process of building the heart is a slow one and involes repetitively attaching square sheets of mesh together over and over again but tho this may seem laborious, it enables me to create the form i want much easier and also makes the sculpture somewhat more sturdier as a whole.

Second Year: First Project. Zabriskie Point Stage 3, Development Conclusion.

The conclusion of my developmen stage has finaly arrived. I have come to the decision to combine the two key concepts i came up with together and have them both presented as final pieces of work for this project.

My final idea is to create both the "Time" concept and "Hartbeat" concept and present them as both individual pieces of work but also have them echoing and workng together perhaps.

Second Year: First Project. Zabriskie Point Stage 3, Development 5

Development 5 was a progression from the previous stage. With this concept i wanted to take the idea of the heartbeat even further and try and make it even more effective with its intention.

This concept still involves creating a large scale sculpture of a heart but instead of using polaroid portraits of people attached to it, i would use broken mirrored shards almost like a mosaic across the surface of the sculpture.

The reason for the replacement the polaroids is that on some level i think that there is still some level of distance between the work and the viewer. Theres a boundary between the viewer and the the work that prevents them from making that personal connection with it that is incredibly important to the themes and meanings i'm trying to represent.

Replacing the polaroids with mirror will enable the viewer to see themselves within the piece of work and thus they have an immediate connection with the piece.

Also using mirror inplace of photographs emphasises the idea of repetition even further with the idea that the sculpture is placed within a constant repetitive state because it is constantly reflecting its environment.

I believe this concept is far more effective than the previous idea for the sculpture however due to the materials that would be used i.e. the mirror shard mosaic, the sculptures ability to move and simulating the movement of an actual beating hard is impaired. So if this idea is taken forward to final development a compromise would have to be reached.

Second Year: First Project. Zabriskie Point Stage 3, Development 4

Keeping in mind my previous concept of time, i began thinking of other pieces of work that could work alongside it to reinforce the idea of repetition even further.
I wanted to create a piece of work that would explore the idea of repetitive notions and experiences that we all go through on a regular basis without being consciously aware. Like the idea of time, we all share this experience and for the most part we are unaware of the seconds and minutes passing by unless we have some activity scheduled for within that day. So i wanted to create a piece of work that echoed this same idea but it had to be something that we all expperience and that we all share.

It occurred to me that there is one thing that we all go through every second of everday without really realising it, our heartbeat. Our hearts beat around 100,000 times a day which equals around 35million times a year. On average our heats beat around 2.5 billion times within the average human lifespan.
Along with time, the heart is one of the single most repetitive things on the planet and only stops repeating its process when an individual dies either permanently or temporarily.
Every human being has a heart and our hearts are constantly beating away inside of us and we are mostly completely unaware of it until certain moments such as when we run and it beats harder. This is something that connects every person on the planet, disregarding age, race and gender.

This first concept design that i came up with was the idea to make a large sculpture of a heart and have polaroid photographs of everyone i encountered within a week attached all over it to emphasise the fact we are all connected by our hearts. This concept involved the creation of a large scale sculpture of a human heart which would actually beat as a real heart would, with a mechanical system inside which would create the illusion of the pulsating heartbeat.

The aim is so that when the viewer looked upon the piece they would feel and see some form of connection that unifes us all and echoes the precious nature of life.

Second Year: First Project. Zabriskie Point Stage 3, Development-Studio Space

These are images of the development work displayed within my studio space at University.

Second Year: First Project. Zabriskie Point Stage 3, Development 3

Alongside the first film concept i came up with, i began thinking of yet another film proposal. This time i had the idea of creating a film that would emphasise the repeating nature of time and the way in which we measure time.
Everday the sun goes up and goes down, the hand on the clock goes round and round and this is a constant. It never stops, each day it keeps on going and to me this idea of time is one of the single most significant repetitive notions thats exists, it's constantly self perpetuating.
So i wanted to capture this within a video piece, to make the viewer slightly aware of that fact. Opening their eyes to this concept of time that we all seem to not really consciously pick up on.
The aim of this piece was to have a digital clock projected large scale onto a wall within the exhibition space, not recording the actual time but instead having it set so that for every 10 seconds that went by, the clock would move ahead one minute. This is so the clock projection would cycle through the whole 24hours within a day in a much shorter length of time, to the point where viewers wuld be able to see a more immediate response. If the projection was to move with mormal time, a viewer would literally have to wait within the exhibition space for more then 24hours to know the clock is essentially on a loop. So speeding up the process would cut this time in half and even if any one single viewer didn't see the whole cycle they would be able to experience atleast a good part of it for the duration of their visit.

Second Year: First Project. Zabriskie Point Stage 3, Development 2

After the unsuccessful blinking experiments inspired by Andy Warhol i did previously, i began to further develop the ideas of repetitive movements even more. I began thinking of ideas for a possible film/video piece that could include a whole collection of repetitive behaviours and actions which could be used within a piece of work. Again i went back to the drawing board and listed things that we do that are repetitive and objects that also seem to repeat and go round in a sort of loop.
Once i had them i began sketching out a rough storyboard documenting a rough plan of the film installation i would be interested in making. The film would include the processes of blinking that i touched upon in previous developments and also including notions of hand movements, travelling, eating and speaking and metaphorical suggestions of repetition such as including a bicycle wheel in motion.

The result was a 14 page storyboard documenting frame by frame how the film would be composed, resulting in a 3-5 minute film piece based around the idea of repetitive behvaiours and processes. All designed to make the viewer aware of the repetitive nature of life and how even the simplist one off things are repeated in some way.

Second Year: First Project. Zabriskie Point Stage 3, Development

My first experimental tests involved looking at the idea of blinking as a repetitive movement. At this stage i was interested in looking at repetitive behaviours that we all undergo throughout our daily lives, particularly behaviours that we are consciously unaware we are doing.

Blinking was one of the behaviours that i brainstormed, it's a process we all do on a daily basis. Every other second of everyday we all blink, it's a continuous process that for the most part we are al unaware we are doing so i wanted to look at this firstly and use the compositions and ideas from my research into Andy Warhol and apply them in some form to my own work.


The result was a large series of images documenting the process of an eye blinking with each alternate image changing each time. The series of images were then placed into a powerpoint with a 1 second gap between slides as a initial test for a possible video piee that could be done for further development. However, after this series of work was completed i felt that they didn't really grasp the idea's that i wanted to get at and that they were rather one dimensional, so i decided to abandon the idea of looking at blinking as the main concept i ran with in search of something which had more depth.

Second Year: First Project. Zabriskie Point Stage 2, Research

Taking the concept of repetition as the focus for my project i began by looking at artists that firstly worked within the 1960's period that would relate back to the time the fim was made and artists that were part of the same movements that came out of that period also. So my initial research began by looking at the works of David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein and of course Andy Warhol. The Pop Art movement that seemed to be born from the 60's was heavily based upon the idea of repetitive materials, compositions and techniques. Hockneys works by layering dozens and dozens of photographs layered on top of each other to creat one whole single imaged was very interesting to me and i original began thinking of ways i could used similar processes to achive a similar feel and look, however i soon changed my mind and looked more closely at Warhols work in particular for inspiration.

With Warhols work, particular his celebrity portraits, he uses the same image composition again and again with just the colour varying in each series. It was this that first caought my interest,i wanted to look at modern day objects and processes and apply this colour variation to them to create a similar effect as Warhol and see what effect it would acheive.

[Images on the left are research that are displayed within my studio space]