Induction Week - Up-cycling Task

On induction week we were given the task of working in groups to create pieces of art work over 2 days. We all had to put in £1 and then use this very limited budget to gain materials from places such as charity shops. we then had to up-cycle these materials and make them into something else. I was in a group of 3 so we had the budget of £3. We began this task by sitting down and planning out what we wanted to do. We spoke about are different interest and made a ming map on what we could possibly up-cycle:

You can see we also started to sketch out ideas as well. We decided we all had an interests in books so we started to think of what we could up-cycle book into. We thought that making a conceptual piece of art work about the ability of the book might be a really interesting approach. After agreeing on this and limiting our ideas down further we made another sketch:

We wanted to have a book coming to life so we wanted to have things coming out of it. we chose butterflies because they are very natural but beautiful and also we thought it might add a further message of development because butterflies develop from a caterpillar. We went out and were lucky enough to find a butterfly encyclopaedia book in a charity shop for only £1.50. We then decided we wanted to add text element as well by having a word hanging down as well so we brought some posters to use for this which only costs us 50p. We finally needed something for all the butterflies and the wording to hand from. We chose to use a branch because we could easily find one in the woods for free and it would add another natural element to the piece. We then delighted tasks to each member of the group. I began to make the origami butterflies out the pages of the book. One of my teammates made the wording 'Discover' out the posters and another team mate began cutting the butterflies out the book to make it look like they were emerging. We then met back up the next day and began consisting our piece really to show to the class. We had to borrow a lighting stand to stick our brach to as we could not think of any other way to have it free standing. Here is some pictures of us completing the construction:

We cut out some smaller butterflies from the images in the book and began threading these as well as the larger origami butterflies.

We then glued the butterflies to the book on top of each other to make it look like they were appearing from the pages.

We then threaded and tied the butterflies and the lettering to the branch so they hung down

This is the final finished piece once construction was finished

We are really happy with the way it turned out. It was effective because we did manage to make it look like the butterflies were emerging from the book. we were also glad that the audience who viewed it interpreted the message in the way we meant it. They understood that it was all about the power of books. The way we could of however improved it was to find a better way of supporting the branch up because the natural feel of the piece is distorted by then having this metal light stand at one side. If we did it again this would be what I would think into changing. Apart from that I am very pleased with the results we produced in such a short amount of time.