UNITY: progress

As my first two pieces were very intricate and complex, I wanted to take a more simple approach to my UNITY project. Still unsure of how I was going to go about finding unity between twelve 12" wooden skewers and twelve 4"x6" white bristol board planes, my first attempt involved using pairs of skewers to create six vertical X's. After playing around with them I, then decided to glue each X together at their center. This created equal spaces between each that measure about 1/8" (the diameter of each skewer). After more playing around, I finally placed a panel on either side of each X and attached them with glue by two corners. After all twelve pannels were attached to each X, six on the left and six on the right, more spaces were created. The distance between each panel was equal to the distance between each X and the diameter of each rod, and along with the two 55 degree angles of the stacked X's, the inside edges of the stacked panels created two new triangle shapes of negative space. This iteration was simple, yet I thought it put emphasis on the negative spaces it created and that it attained unity in the contrast between the roundness of the rods and the flatnes of the panels, the vertical direction of the panels and the diagonals of the rods arraged in X's, and this model also had a lot of balance and symmetry. However, I needed to greatly improve the craft of this piece by reducing the globs of hot glue and aligning the panels better.

I liked my first iteration, but I still tried a somewhat different approach for my second model. Rather than X's, I glued two stacks of six skewers together, attaching two groups of six panels horizontally between the two rod walls. Each panel was glued along their 4" side between each rod, and the two groups of planes were spaced about an inch apart. This iteration also had symmetry and some balance, but it didn't create many interesting spaces and I thought that somehow, it had less unity than my first iteration. The craft was much worse with this model - the glue was slopping along the entire length of each rod, and the panels weren't completely taunt as they stretched between each rod. So for my third iteration I went back to my first model and tried to recreate it with better craft.