My final project was, off the bat, much less of a success than I wanted it or envisioned it to be. It was probably a combination of a bad idea, limited feedback on my end, poor time management, and a dash of bad luck.
Initially my idea was to create a sculpture that would flip peoples mindsets on how they view snakes. I would have liked to represent this with flowers blooming from an abstraction of a snake. However, after approaching a few of my professors and some friends, they all said it was a dumb idea. In hindsight, I think if I had allotted the time, I could have made it work.
Instead, A was advised by my professor to pursue a snakeskin concept, as that way I could more effectively display the data I had.
The data I was using was a ten year observation of snakebites in Nepal from 2008-2017, along with mortality rates. While small, the dataset had a lot that I could work with.
The sculpture has a steel wire skeleton and rises up from a ceramic vase. Covering parts of it is clay with the 3d printed bands of snakeskin placed throughout the piece. Initially I wanted the bands to represent a certain year and they would look drastically different. This is where i ran into some bad luck, as when they were printed, the differentiating part of the bands did not print at all and they all came out looking the same. The end result was a sculpture that looks rushed and unfinished.
They quality of the bands, however, was quite nice and I thought of making a ring out of them.
They were meant to vary somewhat like this, with the neater bands representing years with higher survival rates. By using attractor points to change the intensity of the scales, I was able to create a big variety of snakeskins for every year. At the end of the day, I was only able to print 4 bands in total.
Unfortunately, my undoing was the cramped timeframe I had at the time. Most of my classes this semester were project heavy, and I found it difficult to allot the appropriate time for each of them. Moving forward in my new IMA major, time management will be crucial to keep myself at the fore.