Evaluation of final piece

Across is my final outcome, overall I'm happy with the  final outcome as when looking at it from afar, although its white paper on a white background, it casts shadows on the wall. As I didnt iron out the paper, the edges look raw and organic, which gives variety to the shadows formed. I chose to use the clear thread to give the appearence of the paper floating. To give the piece a light and airy feel. I got the inspiration to give the illusion of floating paper by an artist called Kazunori Matsumara. A Japan born artist who graduated from the Tama Art University in2005.








His work is mainly installation based, similar to my ideas, and used clear thread to suspend pieces in the air, which then cast shadows onto a white background. Looking further into his work, I disovered the piece below, in which he uses sheets of paper to suspend them. By using clear thread, his work gives the illusion of the paper being blown away or floating, which gives the piece a lighter feel. I want this to translante into my work, but my paper will have to lay flat against the wall. This is due to lack of space and also due to the petals being on the faces of the paper and I want them to be seen. I wanted to use the influence I've got from Matsumara in my work, so by using the clear thread, and the shadows I cast I feel I achieved that. I feel the use of the clear thread gives the installation some movement and I imagine it sways when people walk past, making the installation interactive. I found once I hung my piece up I got the same effect, it was in a slight motion whenever I walked pasted, giving the piece a lighter and more natural feel. In a similar way tree branches and leaves sway in the wind.



Looking at my piece close up. I had to repaint some of the areas on the wall as they'd been discoloured, and so the background doesn't look even from close up, like it does from far away. Looking closer at the individual sheets of paper, you can see how the ink has bled from the petals onto the page. This gives my piece an extra layer of motion, as the pigment has moved out from the petals in all directions.

When looking back on my whole journey investigating paper, I found I was concious of my impact on the envoronment throughout the exam. I began keeping a journal in a book which included how to made my own sketchbooks, to recycle paper. I then moved onto using blog to write my reflections as I felt it was better as I was using less man made paper. All the paper I used in my final was shreadded up recycled paper which would have been thrown away, so I repurposed it. Also any scrap paper from any printouts I had were also shreaded and used when making my paper. I found this added a layer of personality to the piece as the paper which the new paper is made of would have been thrown away.

Above is the actual timings that I ended up doing in my final piece exam. I found I ran into several issues. The first of which being that the flowers hadn't dried in time. I had to use an iron to heat them up to speed up the drying process. This meant on the tuesday and wednesday, I had to make paper with embedded leaves. I could do this as the leaves I put in the paper are fresh so they still have their green pigment. However, On the tuesday, I failed to cut the leaves up small enough to expose the cells for the pigment to bleed out, so some of the pieces of paper in my final have a slight green/brown tint, but the leaves arent disperced small enough to give the effect I intended for. On the Wednesday I tried to fix this by using dried spices to try and mimic this effect. I sprinkled the dried parsley into the pulp before making the paper, i
t evenly distrubuted it throughout the paper and did give the paper the intended effect I planned.  On the Thursday I planned to let all my paper dry, but due to my setbacks with the petals, I spent Thursday and Friday making the paper with the petals. On the Thursday, I did all the paper with the purple lily petals, and the Friday I did all the orange/red/yellow petals. I did them separatly incase the petals got mixed in with the water and contaminated other pieces. Onve the half term I had time to reflect and re organise my time management for the final week of my exam. On the monday I had to figure out how to lay out the paper more techincally. I knew which pieces I wanted where but I needed to work out how to hang them so they look evenly spaced out and neat. I came up with the idea of having a 10cm gap between each piece on each column, and 10cm between each column. This even spacing

gave my work some balance, and gave each sheet of paper some space. Meaning each piece can be looked at as an individual piece of art, and then as a series of pieces strung together.

Looking back, I feel my final looked and came out how I hoped for the most part, I had some issues with timing due to the petals not being pressed but that was it. If I were to do this exam over, I would do more research on natural earth pigments and see if I could include them in the paper, to add more variety and a range of colours. Also looking at creating larger sheets of paper, and maybe creating a larger installation, or even an interactive display which people can walk through, mimicing a forest, so linking back to my main concept of paper.