Gabrielle Fitzpatrick
September 25th, 2012
“3 Ways of Observing Flight”
clay, cardboard, wire.
This first unit in The Great Pretender involved a lot of looking at movement, how things fit together and what makes kinetic art work. There is a big link between this class and my Design and Engineering class, and as an artistic person, it’s really helpful for me to see these concepts applied and brought to life in a creative setting.
This piece portrays three different movement patterns that represent flight. The idea came from my spirit animal, a moth. As a class we looked at the way each of our spirit animals move, and what machines or human behaviors mimic their movements. I dissected the way a moth flies carefully, and broke it down into a pattern of movements. Then, I looked at two things: first, what human behavior mimics the flight of a moth most, and second, what machine mimics the flight of a moth. From these observations I made three tracks of movement from wire– that of a moth, a human swimming, and a plane (animal, human behavior, and machine).
After shaping the wire to resemble the movement patterns of these three things, I then focused on decorating my board to make it look like a representation of the element (air) that inspires the movement of a moth.