Assemblage

For this project, we had to discover new materials and find ways to assemble them together. When we were first introduced to this project, we looked at examples of assemblages that people have done in the past. We then went to Westmont's Ridley Tree Museum to view Tony Askew's work, in which he creates a lot of assemblages with varying themes. To get more inspiration, we viewed the recent exhibition at Sullivan Goss, where we found more assemblages made by artists here in Santa Barbara.  After getting some creative ideas from the shows, we visited Alpha Thrift Store, where our mission was to find miscellaneous objects that we could put together in an assemblage. From that little trip, I found a package of seashells and a ceramic cup. At the beginning of the project, I struggled with figuring out what I wanted to assemble using the shells and the cup. I decided to paint some of the shells using acrylic paint and design some cute patterns on them. When we had our first group critique, I was still in an "artist's block"so my partners helped me out. They had some ideas including making garlands of seashells and hanging them. I decided to go a different route and continued to paint on the shells, and then glued them onto a piece of cardboard using the E6000 glue. Then I chose to put wire inside the cup and string some of the shells onto the wire and have it dangle down into the "puddle" of shells. I used E6000 glue to secure the cup onto the cardboard and then I took a round little piece of cardboard and squeezed that into the cup to secure the wires. The glue was hard to work with, as it was my first time using E6000 glue, so it came out fast, and got messy fast. After gluing things down, I decided to take some of the "tiki" looking sticks from the table and use it to create sort of a frame around my shells. My intention was to show my love for the beach, and how I like that the beach to me is very colorful, so I chose to paint the shells different colors, and then arrange them in almost a heart shape. I thought my piece turned out nicely, and I love how the colors of the shells came out. I do wish I had picked up more materials to use for this piece, but that is definitely a lesson learned.




















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