Coral garden
PET bottles and white latex paint
12″ x 12″ x 12″
September 2013

My first green art, made from recycled plastic bottles.

I wanted to make something I’d love to keep and display at home, so I thought of arranging “plants” under the sea that I could easily put on top of a table later on.

Problem:

How do you transform the PET bottle structure to create a 3D sculpture that articulates an undersea creature form?

Procedure:

1. Alter, cut, punch, slice, etc. the PET bottle.
2. Assemble by gluing, riveting, bonding to create a sea creature form mimicking its natural gesture, measuring at least 12″x 12″x 12″.
3. Whitewash the entire sculpture using white latex.
4. Hang/attach/install the work outdoors mimicking its natural gesture.

Corals and anemones are sea creatures,  right? 🙂

My attempt at planning: doing sketches helped me start the process but I didn’t really bother to look at them once I began working:

I played with the bottles using a candle, but after these two, my chest started feeling heavy from the fumes I was inhaling. How anti-green: we were upcycling used plastic bottles, but here I was burning plastic! Tsk, tsk, sumubok lang.

I decided to just stick to cutting and creating coral forms using scissors and cutter:

It was a space-consuming work — I probably had over 30 bottles in all sizes scattered all around the house for 3 weeks!

I used silicone to glue them together and repositioned the corals until I was happy with the garden.

Ready for painting:

Here’s how it looked, glued, painted and laid out on the table:

I thought it looked perfect plopped on top of this big rock — isn’t it mimicking its natural gesture already?

These were installation pieces, though, that needed to suspended at least 1 foot above the ground and also 1 foot away from any surface.

My big takeaway from this plate: pay attention to instructions! I didn’t realize the last bit– to hang the work– was critical and when time came to install mine, it really just fell apart.   The silicone adhesive wasn’t strong enough to hold it together, and I spent 3 hours “sewing” the piece together using thin GI wires (alambre).

It was only after slaving over the installation that I realized I could’ve just put it on a flat base and suspended the base as a whole!

Here we are on presentation day, ready to swim around our life-size aquarium:

“The Chase” with works by Stanley, Grasha and AK:

Close-up of Stanley’s hammerhead shark

Ariel’s lobster:

Tin’s amazing jellyfishie:

Also loved this seadragon by KC:

Abie’s anglerfish:

Jack’s fierce fish (was this a dragon fish?), which Sir Jamel said best captured the essence of this plate: to create a creature in its natural gesture.

Flat shapes and patterns in gray
Poster paint on board
10″ x 15″
August 2013

Can you spot the 10 animals in the painting?

This was one of my favorite plates for this semester. Basic instructions were to draw outlines of 10 animals on paper, cut them out and arrange them on the board for tracing. They will overlap and form shapes within shapes. Paint them in flat shades of gray and add patterns to balance out the picture.

Had to use a super thin brush — 003 I think — to paint the patterns in the teeny tiny shapes. Thinking of new patterns (we weren’t supposed to repeat!) was also a challenge, especially since we were painting and not drawing them in, but really enjoyed making this plate.  Felt like Picasso doing a tiny Guernica.

My new fave thing to do at the beach: sand sculptures!

Working with plaster last semester opened me up to creating 3D forms using wet-dry and powdery material, so I gave sand sculpting a go while on vacation this week.

I started digging and came up with a mound that just seemed to ask for a face.  Since it was November 1, the start of the undas festival, I wanted to do something in honor of the dead.  All the funerary paraphernalia of Egypt and Ancient Rome from last sem’s Art History class came back to me and I ended up with a figure in a resting pose with eyes closed.

I initially did a full body outline but ran out of time (I started at around 2pm, and people were already crowding about on their afternoon/sunset walk at 4pm).

It still came out pretty big —  a low relief sand piece with hair bursting out to the waves.

It was my first ever public art, and I was both shy and excited to get feedback from people passing by.   My first “audience” was a cute French man in a hat who lingered over my shoulder, smiled and said, “Very beautiful.”  Don’t know if he was talking about the piece or me (haha! I should’ve asked).

But seeing happy faces and even people stopping by to take photos was nice — my sandman was connecting to someone other than myself!  Yay.

Of course there was also the matter of kids playing with it and wanting to step on it.  I was surprised I didn’t get flustered over this.   My old self would’ve barked at them to safeguard my work, but I guess that’s one thing ephemeral or temporary art teaches us: to just enjoy the now.

🙂

Attempt number two was more ambitious: I wanted to make a fish that seemed to swim out of the sand.

I didn’t realize making the fin stand would be very difficult with sand, so I had to adjust the angle of the fish head so the fin could rest at the back.

Again it was a kilig moment when I started feeling people stop by to look, but I was just happy it looked like a fish!

Here are mom and dad enjoying our catch for the day:

Was away for a week and maybe once or twice I regretted not bringing pencils or paints with me, but I’m glad I didn’t because I got to explore and play with the most abundant local material instead– sand! The next time you’re at the beach, give sand sculpting a go — it’s free and your canvas can be as big or small as you need it to be. What a great way to play, play, play. 🙂

Every movement in nature is orderly, one thing the outcome of another, a matter of constructive, growing force. We live our lives in tune with nature when we are happy, and all our misery is the result of our effort to dictate against nature. In moments of great happiness we seem to be with the universe; when all is wrong we seem to be alone, disjointed.  Things are going on without us.

– Robert Henri