Bubble.

Suddenly, it’s midterm time, and we’ve been told to physically begin creating our projects from ideas we’ve been formulating since the beginning of the semester. This announcement caught me a little off guard—I’m used to assignments with a little more structure and restriction, and expect instructors to want to approve my idea before I begin. So in class on Tuesday, I felt lost, like nothing I was doing was leading me anywhere, and I didn’t feel ready at all to start something new. But then I realized that I had already come up with my project, a proposal I developed for an assignment for seminar course. At the time, I considered this idea to relate more to my work in theme sequence than the seminar’s focus on the “pocket,” but I had forgotten about those connections. So I’m actually only making one project for drawing, seminar, and theme sequence. (like they’ve told us, it really does all connect…)

My plan is to make a sphere I can fit inside of, its structure inspired by Brunelleschi’s dome. I will be enclosed in my “bubble,” able to see out of a few gaps and move around, and then will escape from it, through its destruction. This week I’ve been carefully considering my materials and have chosen insulation, bubble wrap, and saran wrap because these materials are meant to protect or enclose but are themselves insubstantial. I plan to cover the inside of my bubble with images that both emulate the inside of the frescoed dome and reference my personal history and artmaking—those things that make me stay in my bubble.

It seems a little strange to me that I came up with this idea a few weeks ago as something that I never seriously thought I could make, and now I’m already pretty invested in it. I’ve bought my materials. I started once and completely failed. (see picture of the mess of a green thing…) I started again, with new materials. I learned how to solder. I finished a mini sphere as a “sketch” of my project. Now I have to figure out how to make another one, four times bigger. But I can really envision the final result and I’m excited about the process I’ll be taking to get there.

Here’s my mini bubble, in process.