Sculpture: A Little Too Late

This sculpture is a symbolism to what lays before us if we do not correct our consumist habits. On it, the dead bird represents a double symbol. It represents Faiza, the mascot of New York University Abu Dhabi, but also in itself a falcon, the national bird of the United Arab Emirates; both of wich are the expected to be the audience of the sculpture, and hopefully will see themselves and their actions reflected on it. The sculpture itself has been inspired by the images of the autopsies of birds showing how they had died due to consumption of small plastic waste, such as bottle caps, straws and small pieces of plastic.

Additional symbolism in the sculpture include the hand sanitizer and the unopened water bottle, which represent the struggle for the bird reaching both health and resources that are valuable for all life on earth, like water. This scultpure overall is a tragic prediction of what would happen if we don’t change our aggresive habit of consuming single use plastic, were if we don’t act now it will be a little too late.

 

I think the main difficulty was the actual task at hand and that was making a sculpture out of trash. The first few times assembling the project it did look like trash still. Another difficulty was that there was not a variety in terms of the waste collected as it was mainly plastic bottles which felt a little constricting when we worked with it. Planning it was also a little difficult in terms of how we wanted to convey the message and how to make it reach the biggest audience possible

Patience is key in building the project. I think there were not many failures. It is just that we had multiple ideas prior to this since they were large scale projects rather than something that is doable with the amount of trash we had.

Probably with more time we could have enhanced the details, made a bigger scale, collected more trash ,and added more components to it. Another rather tricky improvement is to make the sculpture itself transportable. To increase the impact a different background could be added to show the real environment in which it can be found. That was digitally done above but hopefully while exhibiting it sand and plastic blue bags could be used to create that environment.