3D Product and Spatial Design Reflection

Today was a fruitful challenge. I already know I don’t wish to pursue design as my pathway. Furthermore, the hands-on skills required for 3D Product and Spatial Design don’t come as easily to me as other modes of creation, partly because I’m less experienced in this area. My challenge was allowing these facts to lie in their reality and still create something rewarding.

I wish to work for myself (not a client) and I am more interested in what art can express than what function it fulfills. I don’t want my own work to be beholden to a real-world function and, if did happen to be functional, I am more interested in its “usefulness” as seen through a conceptual lens aiding the work’s ultimate idea. Telling stories is essential to me, the personal reaching out to the world through narrative. There is something cold to me about design, impersonal in manufacturing and repetition. Work that exists in a constant state of periphery is unappealing to me. Maybe I’m being reductive. I recognize commercial design’s real-world value; it’s just not for me.

The day was, critically, more than a confirmation of why I wish to pursue other forms of art. In being removed from the kind of art with which I identify, I was able to take a breath and view each outcome less critically. Today was about play: jumping, scribbling, twisting. Coaxing wire into abstract contortions and then thrusting what we’d made into the arena of the representational. I wouldn’t call the play fun. Yet I haven’t connected to any of the work I’ve made in my current state of artistic transition--no matter the area--and it was fulfilling to break into something new and see what resulted. I ended up faintly pleased with my final wire sculptures. The art itself means little to me. The act of creating them meant much more.

Part 1

Part 1

3D Product and Spatial Design Day 1

Confirm copying

Restore backup