aerie- 1

sorry that the quality of these photos is so poor.

statement:

I have titled this piece aerie. Aerie means home, to me this piece is about that sense of home that one feels when encompassed by a space. When I am home I sense a feeling of warmth that surrounds me immediately upon entrance. A sense of safety through the utilization of a shelter of some form is one of the primary needs that must be met by all living creatures in order to progress further in life. Because of this primal need all animals make a shelter where they can seek refuge from enemies, rest, and raise offspring in. For this piece I aimed to create a space that could embody the sensation that I feel when I return to the space that I regard as home. For me my home is my mother, wherever she is I feel safe and I know that I can seek comfort in her company. I believe that this association of my mother and home is part of my primal nature and is therefore common between myself and animals. Mammals spend the first months of their lives living within their mother in a biological shelter that is suited only for themselves. The sense of the womb is something that drove this piece for me, I wanted to create a piece that would close around the person who entered into it and would fit each person differently

Initially I wanted this piece to feel like home in the sense that one would regard home as the place of personal space. I wanted to use a myriad of materials to imply something similar to the nest of a bird, made of found materials that represent the area where the bird lives out their life. However, soon after I began the project my mother became ill and I realized that my sense of home is directly tied to her, not to where I make my personal space. For my initial piece I wanted to display the work vertically and have people enter it through an entrance that was in the front. I planned on having an area where the person inside could look up and see different light sources as though they where in a cave. The exterior was to look much like a mud nest, but created from cardboard. While working on a wire armature for the piece I placed the structure horizontally on the ground and was taken by the different effect that the piece had on me. This change of direction ended up changing the entire aesthetic plan for the piece. I decided to use the cardboard to paper mache the armature instead of weaving strips through and to use ropes to displace the weight of the piece and hang it from a beam instead of using resin-coated rope to support the weight of the piece. As I worked the new piece I did a large portion of the paper mache and inner bubble-wrap surface from within the piece, when possible, because I felt that this was important in the creation of the piece in the three-dimensional.

Upon completion I had used more materials than I had originally planned in my cardboard only plan. I still used the cardboard in my piece, however I deconstructed the layers of cardboard from boxes that I found in various dumpsters instead of stacking it and cutting it like a topographical map. I used these deconstructed layers to paper mache the form that I had constructed from chicken wire. Before completion of the paper mache process I weaved some medium-strength natural rope through the wire to create a network or vein system-something that would connect the interior of the piece to the outside world. The piece was still very fragile at this point so I decided to coat the paper mache with a resin in hopes of the piece gaining structural strength. I was very indecisive about how I would treat the interior of the piece. Initially I wanted to treat the inside with a sort of paper mulch, but time did not permit for this treatment so I was at a loss. Finally, after much indecision, I decided that I would use bubble wrap. The bubble wrap's transparency would allow the frame of the piece to be visible while still serving to protect the occupant from the sharp points of the chicken wire frame- like the membrane of the placenta acts in the womb.