Conceptual Process – Resilience / Druck
Double-Speak
It’s been a busy week, in a way that reminds me that I made the right decisions in the past year. I still have one foot in the world I used to work in whilst I build my practice and creative income streams, and I do on the whole enjoy it, but when it gets busy or something familiar happens I remember why I only have one foot in and it resolves me to press on with my crazy dream!
The word resilience gets bandied about in the corporate world it has become one of those phrases that means nothing any more. Every single job ad for the last place I worked for was looking for someone who was ‘resilient.’ Being resilient was one of the best attributes you could have, along with being ‘authentic’, ‘adaptable’ and ‘flexible.’
Anyone who has worked in a corporate environment knows that being resilient means dealing with treatment that crosses the line and asks too much every day and getting up the next day to face it again. Being authentic means being the same as everyone else within the expected standards and being adaptable and flexible means just getting it done when what you’re being asked to do changes on an hourly basis and the expectations grow exponentially and on some occasions unbeknownst to you.
Enthusiasm – Resilience – Druck
I had spent ten years working in a firm which at first was quite fun and slowly but surely due to the leadership of someone who could have been straight out of an 80s film about wall street, became a place that made me seriously ill, due to my commitment to ‘resilience’.
In the end it didn’t work any more and neither did I. As I spend this few years rebuilding my working life, there is quite a rich vein of work that will relate to my former world. This piece being the first, early career resilience became druck (German word for pressure/stress which I feel is quite onomatopoeic) for a sustained period and then in the end, became unsustainable.
Organic Concept Development
Whilst this concept was one of the first that came to mind of my conceptual pieces, it came into being third in line. It also hasn’t turned out exactly as it appeared in my head, so I have resolved to make a second version closer to my initial vision. That being said, I am so pleased with what happened here since I think it adds to the feeling of turmoil and so, it stays! It’s version A, with a version B that will be made at some point.
Learned a lot from this one, making the ruler was especially fun, I was going to try and smash a real ruler at first but as well as that being a pretty dumb idea from a safety point of view, I also realised that the word ‘shatter proof’ which I originally wanted on my ruler, as that’s how I remember them from school, does appear on rulers, but not in the strange shatter evoking font that I really wanted to represent.
As well as this, rulers are thinner than I remember and I wanted a colour tint, not white. So I worked to create something that was representative of something rather than using something itself and for this purpose was more effective and more aesthetically pleasing. An important lesson for me in my steps into conceptual representation!
In making the ruler I used some quick setting silicone putty by simply pushing a ruler into it and then filling the mould that was created with 24 hour cure epoxy. That was the easy part.
Shatter Resistant
I spent quite a bit of time working out how to get the illusion of a shattering ruler suspended in a moment and worked out that I would need deep pour epoxy to make sure there was no bubbles in the cure and also that the rectangle I placed it in would be deep enough. Once I’d decided on this, the ruler needed to be made first so it was ready to get placed on top of the first part of the epoxy pour. Once I had the basic shape, which again was a condensed vision of a ruler, I realised that the words shatter resistant went better than shatter proof, my original thoughts. So these were the painted words.
Then came the painting of the numbers and lines but that could be traced from my example ruler. I also had to decide on the shatter pattern before I placed, this was probably what took up the most thought, getting that wrong would mean I needed a new ruler and that would have been quite demotivating!
Frozen Turmoil
So far so good. I placed the pieces of ruler I had simply cut with scissors after the pattern I had sketched out for maximum effect onto the deep pour epoxy that was at the right stage of cure to have bits embedded. After a few more hours it was time to pour the second half to encase the piece.
The next day when I came back to check on the pour, excited to see my work almost fully realised after so long thinking about it, the cure had failed as it was full of little weird bits and was basically water, it was thinner than it was when I poured it. No big deal I thought, annoying but I’ll just pour away the failed, wipe it down with some alcohol and try again.
However, as I poured away and started to scrape, I noticed that a small amount of the second pour had fused and had created a strange texture surrounding my embedded shatter proof rule. As I looked at it I realised it emphasised the shatter effect and added to the chaos which had led to the fracture and the feelings that surrounded the event itself.
This accident was more fitting than I could have planned so I decided to clean it up as was, add some varnish and have this as the live action version. With the finished reminder encased in a solid block later to come…..more of a reflection than a representation.
So, there you have it, probably my most personal piece to far to my recent life experiences.
Update: You can now see some more photos of this work at my Power, Tech and Control collection HERE
See the stories behind my other conceptual artworks HERE